


Never the Same Tide Twice

by sunfair



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Secret Identity, Surfing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 10:05:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunfair/pseuds/sunfair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn is a successful pop star from the UK, transplanted to LA. He is the product of completely contrived and neatly packaged PR and marketing, including a fake name. Liam Payne is a professional surfer who lives alone in a bungalow on the beach, taking a break after a string of successful competitions. When their paths cross accidentally and it's clear that Liam doesn't recognize him in the slightest, Zayn drops his tired pretenses for the opportunity just to be himself for once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never the Same Tide Twice

**Author's Note:**

> The absolutely gorgeous accompanying fan mix, [Lying on a Beach in the Sun](http://slightly.tumblr.com/post/75816170570/lying-on-a-beach-in-the-sun-1dbigbang-a-mix-to), was made by [suth](http://archiveofourown.org/users/suth).
> 
> All my love to [cantgetnoworse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cantgetnoworse) for endless encouragement and vigilant wrangling of my disastrous relationship with the comma. I'm also forever indebted to [herstrionics](http://herstrionics.tumblr.com/) and [katienyc](http://archiveofourown.org/users/katienyc) for going to battle for me with eleventh hour beta duties. Before I even tried to write this, I talked it out endlessly with [sandwich-armada](http://sandwich-armada.tumblr.com/) and she was my go-to for geographical plausibility. You've all made this so much better than I ever could have on my own, thank you.

Zayn left the party without realizing he wasn’t going to return. He also deliberately refrained from telling anyone that he was leaving—not the pretty blonde starlet he rode over with from the club who he vaguely recalled snogging a few times, not the talkative shaggy-haired bloke whose coke Zayn had shared most of the night, and definitely not the hosts whose expensive scotch he had single-handedly finished off. He was fairly certain he never actually met the hosts, once he thought about it.

After slipping out of the garage and past the vintage Mercedes, Zayn made his way down the driveway toward the street, gravity pulling him along the slanted slope of concrete. He took long, hard drags from his cigarette, the rhythm of his steps counting off the dissipating sounds of the party. As he approached the road, he decided to keep walking, his stylist-selected charcoal suede boots following the descent of the pavement. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was. His phone was a useless weight in his pocket, the battery run down while he’d pretended to use it to avoid conversation—a convenient shield for his isolation.

He stuck as close to the curb as he could manage, and for the most part proceeded to amble along the twisting streets unimpeded, always following a downward route at each junction. The houses were dark and aside from the faint clip of his steps the night air was still and hushed with the late hour. The occasional car drifted past him, motor humming as it slowed and passed him cautiously; Zayn ducked his head away from the glare of the headlights each time, hunching his shoulders in an attempt to avoid being seen. He tried to remember what time it had been when he’d last bothered to check, but his recollection was unreliable and contradictory; it could be anytime between midnight and sunrise. The sky was still dark, and when he looked up Zayn could still see the scattering of the faint points of stars between the tall tops of the palm trees, the whole tapestry of them tilting wildly as his vision lagged behind the upward turn of his face.

He swayed a little, unsteady from the self-inflicted vertigo, and stopped walking for a moment. Clenching his hands into fists in the pockets of his leather jacket, he briefly contemplated sitting down on the curb right there to wait, and wondered how long it would take for someone—anyone—to find him. His heart thudded a little harder as the possibilities spiraled out in his thoughts, shaping themselves into probable tabloid headlines. _Zack Miller’s nighttime stroll... Zack Miller’s residential walk of shame... Zack Miller – lost! ... Zack Miller goes missing... ZACK MILLER IS GONE._ For a fleeting moment the sheer unhindered freedom of it ricocheted through him wildly, leaving him untethered, and Zayn thought he might break into hysterical laughter right there, alone on the street in the dark. Instead he decided to continue walking, the adrenaline urging him onward.

By the time he reached the point where the roads leveled out, the inclines disappearing, the ink dark of the sky was just beginning to shift to a mottled grey. Zayn had seen the sun come up four days in a row, but always from the cavernous quiet of his rented house in the hills, chain-smoking on the terrace before succumbing to a fitful sleep. He had no idea just how he would find his way to his bed this time, but that vague uncertainty melted away quickly the moment Zayn realized he’d stumbled upon the beach.

He was fairly sure that trudging along for ages in the sand was going to ruin his boots, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. There were always more boots, more clothes, more of anything he could dream of wanting, all at his request; Zayn only had to voice his desire for something and someone would bring it to him. At first, of course, he had been amazed and awed by the magnitude of possibility that being Zack Miller had brought him, but the novelty of material wealth had long since worn off. Luxury and possessions and status had their comforts, but Zayn was no longer convinced that the true price of them was worth it.

He carried on walking, staggering unsteadily in the shifting sand, the stars above him disappearing with the gradual approach of the sunrise, the sound of the ocean drifting in and away rhythmically on his left. In the nearly nine months he’d lived in the hills, Zayn had only been to the beach on one occasion and had left just as quickly as he’d arrived, frowning in disgust and suffocated equally by the cloying heat, the crowds and the overwhelming vastness of the ocean. His pre-dawn solitude was almost the opposite of that too-warm afternoon, the cool salty air clearing his mind and calming the lingering effects of the chemicals knocking around in his bloodstream. He couldn’t quite see the water, aside from the faint white tips of the waves as they rolled over and met the sand in hushed swells, but the lulling repetition in the distance settled him immensely. His steps slowed and then halted entirely, and Zayn decided to sit, facing the black vastness of the largest body of water on the planet, and allow the day—whichever day it was—to begin.

Once he sat down, it took very little time for him to recline onto his back, resting his hands over his chest, and with his next breath Zayn closed his eyes—only for a moment, he told himself—while he pushed away the anxiety that threatened to bubble back to the surface. “You’re fine,” he told himself in a raspy whisper, his heart knocking in his chest like an echo. “You’re fine.” He repeated it silently in his mind until he heard it in his mom’s voice, clear but distant, then fading away to silence.

In what felt like the next moment, Zayn was flinching violently, his eyes flying open; someone was touching him, had just touched him right below his jaw at his throat. He raised his arm in an attempt at self-defense, heavy and uncoordinated with sleep, his eyes slamming shut fast against the blinding brightness of the sky.

“Oh thank god, are you alright?”

Zayn only managed to open one of his eyes, and only the tiniest fraction at that. All he could see was the dark shape of someone looming over him, backlit by the sunshine, and Zayn scrambled to try to sit up.

“You sleep like you’re dead!”

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Zayn finally looked upward. The man stood over him had very obviously been surfing, his dark wetsuit molded to his slender body, his hair wet and wavy and falling across his forehead. He was covered in a million droplets of water, all of them glinting in the sunlight.

“No such luck,” Zayn replied darkly, pushing at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger as his headache heralded its presence just behind them.

“Sorry, what was that?”

He waved his hand in dismissal. “M’fine. Cheers.”

“You sure about that?”

Zayn dared a glance upward again, still shielding his eyes from the sun, half expecting at any moment to be recognized. His gaze was met with a concerned stare.

“Because—no big deal or anything—but you’re sort of in my backyard right now.”

Zayn twisted around slowly to look over his shoulder. Sure enough, set back about a hundred metres stood a small house, flanked on both sides by clusters of palm trees. Its diminutive stature seemed almost comical given the typical size and grandeur of the beach homes Zayn could see in the distance. The Spanish-style stucco walls were a pale salmon color, the doors and windows accented in a deeper shade of melon. Zayn could see a patio where two surfboards were resting upright by the back door, near a hammock suspended in the shade. The entire thing resembled a drawing that had been made by a child.

“Do you need help? Could I phone someone for you, perhaps?”

It was only with those words that Zayn consciously realized his shack-dwelling surfer sounded distinctly English, the revelation causing his heart to pound uncomfortably in his chest. Surely the immense awkwardness of recognition would arrive soon. Zayn had to get out of there fast.

“My phone’s dead,” he said, deliberately flattening his vowels to disguise the origin of his own inflection. “If I could charge it just enough to make a call, I can go.”

Zayn pulled his phone from the pocket of his jeans, brushing away the sand that clung to it, and held it up for inspection.

“Yeah, alright,” the surfer replied, tipping his head toward his house. “C’mon, you can use mine for a bit.”

Zayn pushed himself to his feet, shuffling unsteady in the sand, his limbs protesting, aching and stiff from having slept where he landed. As he followed along toward the house, the sand in his clothes shifted, trickling against his skin, collecting in every crevice. He ran a hand through the back of his hair, fingers combing through the tousled mess, rough sand falling out against the back of his neck.

The house somehow seemed even smaller up close, the round glass table and wicker chairs on the rear patio covered by a pale blue shade umbrella. After setting his surfboard beside the others, his host slid the back door open and disappeared inside. Zayn lingered outside on the concrete instead of following him in, the uncertainty of intrusion keeping him from proceeding.

“Would you like a glass of water or anything?”

Zayn leaned forward a bit, peering past the doorway and into the kitchen. “Erm. Please, yeah, that would be great, cheers.” 

The inside décor was like nothing Zayn had ever seen—all turquoise and yellow, Formica countertops, starburst-patterned linoleum floors and blown-glass light fixtures. It was straight out of the 1970s, but tidy and well cared for. A ticking clock on the wall in the shape of an owl informed him it was just past eight.

“Oh—sorry, you’re welcome to come in if you’d like. I probably should have said that.”

Zayn stepped inside slowly, taking the offered glass of water and draining half of it in one go, continuing to gaze curiously at the details of the cabinets and the fixtures.

“I know—I know,” the surfer grinned, gesturing with a wave of his hand. “It’s all very ancient. But it’s in really good shape, don’t you think? Adds a certain charm. So it seemed like a shame to just clear it all out on principle. I’m Liam, by the way, I think I forgot to say that, too.”

Liam extended his hand outward in greeting, and Zayn clasped it lightly, finally giving him a good once over. Zayn had never seen a wetsuit up close or in person before. Liam was lean but filled his out nicely.

“Right,” Liam said, his tone tinged with uncertainty, dropping his hand away. “I’ll just get my phone charger, then?”

“I’m Zayn.”

A million alarm bells went off in Zayn’s head. He hadn’t actually been allowed to utter that phrase in years, but the words had rolled right off his tongue with ease. If pressed, he couldn’t have begun to explain why. It might have been for any number of reasons—the disorientation of having woken up hungover on the beach; the surrealism of the surfer’s tiny bungalow and its retro décor that made it feel like Zayn had wandered onto a movie set; or the chaos and aimlessness that had brought him there to begin with, like he’d been making a film right up until the moment he needed to say his own name, and then suddenly and irrevocably called _cut_.

“Zayn? Which bit of the UK are you from, then? I can’t quite place your accent,” Liam asked as he walked off, ducking out of the kitchen.

“Grew up in Bradford,” Zayn said, raising his voice to be heard, his heart thudding hard again with the admission. “And you?”

“Just outside of London, originally,” Liam explained, reappearing with a phone charger and beginning the hunt for an empty outlet between the counter and the overhead cabinets. “I moved around quite a bit, though. Dad’s English, my mum’s American. Haven’t really lived in the UK since I was... about thirteen, I suppose.”

“Why would you,” Zayn said, gesturing slightly with what was left of his water, “when you have all this?”

Liam threw Zayn a sideways glance, and then grinned small to himself, wistful, and shrugged. “Well, I like it here, anyhow.”

“That was meant to be a joke,” Zayn said, feeling suddenly small. “It was a really shit one, sorry.”

Liam held out his hand for Zayn’s phone. “I think I’ll make myself a cup of tea. Would you like one?”

Zayn nodded, giving his phone over, allowing Liam to plug the charger into it. As Liam then went about filling the kettle—a proper electric one, stirring Zayn’s longing for home again—his phone powered on and proceeded to trill and beep with a multitude of notifications. Zayn leaned against the counter and rang his car service, asking Liam for the address, repeating it back into the receiver.

“Cheers,” Zayn said quietly after ending the call, setting his phone down to let it charge a while longer, clearing out his missed messages. “For everything, I mean.”

“Bit of a novelty really,” Liam said, his tone lighter, pulling two ceramic mugs and a canister of teabags from the cabinet. “Surprise overnight guests.”

Zayn flushed slightly, but smiled. “I didn’t realize I was anywhere near anyone’s house.”

“And I presume we’re not near your own, either?”

Zayn frowned. “Not really, no.”

“Milk?” Liam asked, already going for the refrigerator.

“Always.”

The car service told Zayn twenty minutes, but showed up in less than fifteen. He wasn’t even halfway through his tea, the warmth and the caffeine already doing wonders for his hangover, and Liam had just begun telling him about moving to the states and the boarding school he’d attended and how he’d taken up surfing as a kid and turned it into something of a career. Zayn was a little lost in the anecdote, watching Liam’s mouth as he spoke, his phone alert jolting him from his reverie.

“That’d be my ride,” Zayn said, disconnecting his phone from the charging cable.

“Oh, right. Okay. Well, just through here, then,” Liam said, leading Zayn through the corridor to the front of the house.

“Thanks again,” Zayn mumbled, lingering at the front door as Liam held it open a fraction. He glanced outside at the idling black town car in Liam’s drive.

“Sure, yeah. Take care of yourself,” Liam said quietly.

Zayn hesitated another moment, looking back toward the kitchen, biting his lip. He inhaled to speak but stopped himself, reaching for the door and pulling it open. “Goodbye, Liam,” he announced without looking back, and stepped out.

“Bye,” Liam replied.

Zayn was no more than five steps away when he turned around fast, springing back and catching the door with his open hand before Liam could close it completely. “Could I take you to lunch tomorrow?”

His words were short and clipped, like he couldn’t say them fast enough. His heart hammered hard against his ribs as he eagerly searched Liam’s face for a reply.

“As thanks,” Zayn added quickly. “For your assistance and—your discretion.”

Liam had given no hint or clue that he’d recognized Zayn in the slightest, and the confusion that now spread on his face gave Zayn further hope that he actually hadn’t.

“You don’t have to, really,” Liam said, his tone unconvincing. “I mean. Unless you really—if you actually wanted to, then I suppose that’s a different thing entirely.”

“One o’clock?” Zayn asked.

“Sure,” Liam smiled. “Yeah, one o’clock it is.”

*

It was much closer to two by the time Zayn’s chauffeured car pulled in to Liam’s drive the next day. Traffic had been a nightmare, just as it always was, and Zayn also frustratingly had no way to contact Liam to tell him he’d be late. By the time Zayn was stood back at Liam’s front door, knocking firm and quick, his nerves were on fire, his stomach twisting sharply.

Liam appeared with an apple in his hand, half-eaten as he held it between his thumb and forefinger. He was in a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans that sat low on his hips, his hair styled up into a sleek quiff. A silver chain rested against his neck, the end of it tucked into his t-shirt.

“Hello,” Liam said carefully.

“Hi—” Zayn said quickly, breathless. “I’m such a shit, I know. I would have called, but—”

Liam shrugged a little, smiling small. “It’s fine.” He looked beyond Zayn to where the car was idling in the driveway beside Liam’s Jeep. His brow slowly creased in the center of his forehead. “You brought a driver?”

“Yeah,” Zayn said, glancing back, remembering suddenly that being driven from place to place on a daily basis is probably atypical to most people. He cringed a bit, fidgeting, scratching at his eyebrow with his thumbnail. “I don’t exactly drive, so.”

“Oh.” Liam still looked confused.

“Is that alright? I can send him away, or,” Zayn paused, awkwardness inhibiting his words. “Do you even still want to have lunch with me?”

Liam looked surprised at that. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Zayn relaxed slightly, watching as Liam took another bite from his apple. “Shall we just go, then?”

“I’ll grab my keys,” Liam said, gesturing behind him with the remains of his apple.

Zayn was annoyed at how nervous he felt, jittery and unsettled like some of his early episodes of stage fright. It was ridiculous, really; he was only trying to do something nice for Liam, taking him for lunch out of gratitude, and he had nothing to be nervous for, no reason to value Liam’s opinion any more than that of anyone else he’d met. In general, Zayn had absolutely no time for the bronzed, beach-going, surf-obsessed crowds who ran rampant all over the city. But for reasons Zayn couldn’t put a name to, with Liam, it somehow mattered.

Zayn couldn’t remember the last time anything had mattered.

Liam reappeared with a dark brown leather jacket on, as well as a pair of dark aviators. At the car, the driver stepped out to open the door for them both. Liam took the time to fasten his seatbelt once they were settled side by side in the back seat.

“I know a really nice Cuban place,” Zayn said, fidgeting slightly, tugging at his sleeves. “Is that alright?”

Liam nodded, short and quick. “Sounds good, sure.”

“There’s a patio in the back and loads of ivy growing up the walls,” Zayn explained, gesturing with his hands. “Reminds me a bit of, like. Gardens back home.”

“Nice,” Liam said, shifting a little in his seat, picking at a wrinkle at the knee of his jeans. “How long have you lived here, then?”

“A few months,” Zayn replied vaguely, shifting his gaze to the window, watching the blur of the passing houses and palm trees. “Not long.”

“Did you move here for work, or?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Zayn said. “What about you?”

Liam shook his head. “I moved here because I wanted to. My options were a bit open at the time, I suppose. Been competing all over the place for a few years, decided to take a break. So I looked for a house that had what I wanted, mainly you know, the beach and the surf, and here I am.”

“That’s a pretty easy list, all told.”

Liam grinned, glancing away. “I try not to make things more complicated than they need to be. As a general rule.”

Zayn bit back a grin in return, his jittery nerves finally settling a bit. “Is that your way of saying you wouldn’t end up passed out on the beach in a stranger’s back yard?”

Liam smiled, meeting Zayn’s gaze again. “Well, I certainly can’t say that I’ve never slept on the beach before.” He shrugged slightly, raising an eyebrow. “But it was probably intentional on my part when I did.”

“Key difference there, yeah.” Zayn turned his gaze to the window again, fighting his smile.

“How on earth did you end up there anyhow? Did your friends ditch you or something?”

“Went for a walk, I guess,” Zayn said. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Liam hummed a little, like he had a retort but held it back.

*

The café that Zayn picked was on a quiet street, tucked away from the main road, and in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday it was all but deserted, save a pair of elderly women having tea and chatting at a table in the corner.

“Could we have the patio?” Zayn asked the hostess.

She obliged Zayn’s request and he was pleased to discover when they arrived in the back that the patio, too, was empty. He and Liam slid into opposite sides of a tall booth, a canopy of ivy twisting in the grid of the pergola above them. Zayn knew the menu well enough already that he didn’t need to read it, and took the opportunity to surreptitiously watch Liam instead, studying the strong lines of his jaw and his brow, the curve and span of his shoulders, and the way his lips twitched subtly as he read over the menu.

“Oh brilliant, plantains,” Liam said, sincerely enthusiastic as he pointed to the page. “I’d hoped there’d be plantains.”

“’Course there are,” Zayn said, his tone more fond than admonishing. “What sort of—listen. I wouldn’t bring anyone to a Cuban restaurant that didn’t serve plantains.”

Liam smiled without looking up from the menu, turning the page slowly. “Is that so.”

“Well, that would just be madness, wouldn’t it? I do have standards.”

“Totally,” Liam said airily, his dark eyes bright with amusement as he looked up and met Zayn’s gaze. “Complete madness.”

“To be avoided at all costs,” Zayn continued. “Ill-advised.”

“A bit like sleeping alone on the beach when your phone battery’s gone flat.”

“Ah, there it is,” Zayn said, the laughter apparent in his voice. “Been an entire five minutes, I was starting to worry.”

Liam’s smile widened, but he had the decency to look a bit sheepish when he held his gaze. “Sorry.”

The server arrived and Zayn desperately craved a cocktail, but Liam went with water and Zayn ended up asking for tea instead. They ordered a plate of plantains to share and then their lunch, the usual chicken sandwich for Zayn, and a salad for Liam. Once the server cleared their menus, Liam seemed even more fidgety, meticulously aligning his fork and knife on the table.

“You were starting to tell me yesterday about how you first got into surfing,” Zayn said. “Before I had to go.”

“Oh, right,” Liam said, folding his hands together to keep them still. “It was the summer I turned thirteen. The year my family moved here from England. I wasn’t—I couldn’t do very many sports things, as a kid. I never got into footy or any of that. And I certainly couldn’t play baseball or basketball or any of the popular sports here. So I was a bit of an outcast, I suppose.”

The way Liam’s tone fell had Zayn’s chest clenching in sympathy, immediately and vividly recalling similarities to his own adolescence, his creative interests far outweighing his athletic ones, leaving little room for any social successes. 

“I remember I used to—“ Liam halted abruptly, looking away awkwardly, shaking his head. “Never mind, actually. Sorry.”

“No, tell me.”

“So I took a month of surfing lessons that summer, and I sorted out that it was something I could actually, you know, do,” Liam said quickly, reaching for his water afterward.

“What were you about to say before?”

Liam sipped at his water and then laughed, short and dismissive. “It’s stupid, you’ll laugh at me.”

“Probably not, actually.”

“I was just thinking about how I would listen to audio books in my room, and repeat the words out loud, you know? Trying to get rid of my accent.”

Zayn frowned in confusion. “Your accent is fine, though.”

“Yes, well,” Liam said, averting his gaze again, poking at his place setting. “Apparently not, where I went for school.”

Zayn watched Liam’s hands attempt to align his silverware and wasn’t sure what to say. He had no context for Liam’s posh American school experience, but he knew the misery of years of relentless ridicule just for the crime of being true to who you are.

“Thank fuck all that is done with, eh?”

Liam glanced up, his gaze softening as he grinned a little. “Suppose it is, yeah.”

“Do you ever miss England?” Zayn asked.

Liam nodded, his expression shifting to something softer, nostalgic. “All the time.”

Their food arrived and they ate slowly, consumed in conversation about the best bits of their hometowns and everything they missed about living there, ricocheting between mutual excitement at shared preferences and wistful pangs of homesickness. Liam then diverged into listing the things he loved most about southern California in counterpoint, like he couldn’t possibly indulge himself in his own complaining for too long. Zayn pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose in disagreement; he’d been living there long enough to know it would never truly feel like home.

“So you don’t care for the beach, or the ocean, or the sunshine, or... people?” Liam questioned, poking at the last bit of the plantains with his fork. “Why on earth would you want to live here, then?”

“I wonder that myself most days,” Zayn said.

Liam chewed thoughtfully, waiting to speak again until he’d swallowed. “Have you been up the coast at all? Seen anything outside of the city?”

Zayn shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

“Ah, you should, you should definitely do that. Might change your mind a bit.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Zayn said flatly, skeptical.

“If you’d like—” Liam began, halting as the server returned to clear their plates, silence lingering until they were alone again. “I mean. I could take you sometime. You know. If it was something you wanted to do one day.”

“Yeah?” Zayn was surprised at the way his heart rate kicked up at the idea. 

“Sure, yeah. I think perhaps you and the beach had a bit of a bad start.”

Liam’s smile did little to settle Zayn’s excitement, the corners of his own mouth turning up. “Not sure I believe you.”

“Alright, well, let’s say you give me a day—one full day to show you around. And if you’re still all—” Liam gestured a thumbs down and made a ridiculous _ppbbbtthh_ noise— “about the beach, then I’ll give up on it.”

“Yeah, alright,” Zayn agreed. “Deal.”

“Excellent,” Liam said, and then made Zayn shake on it. Their hands slid together and Liam’s grasp was strong and warm. Zayn couldn’t help brushing his thumb along the back of Liam’s before dropping it quickly.

Liam tried to argue when the bill arrived but Zayn insisted on paying it; he was still determined to express his gratitude to Liam for all but literally scooping up him up off the beach the previous morning.

In the car, Zayn suggested they exchange numbers and realized it had been ages since he’d even looked at his phone. There were a whole slew of new messages waiting, texts and missed calls and voicemails, and in the end he put his own number into Liam’s phone to avoid the business of clearing all of the alerts away or taking the chance of Liam seeing them.

When Liam asked for Zayn’s full name, he nearly slipped, but caught himself in time to spell out his actual first and last name as Liam typed it in. Liam sent him a text straight away and then that was sorted and Zayn’s moment of alarm faded into obscurity.

“So, I’ll call you. About driving up the coast,” Liam said as they pulled in to his driveway, the car rolling to a halt.

“Yeah, please do,” Zayn smiled.

Liam reached for the door handle, and then turned back to Zayn again. “Thank you again for lunch, it was lovely. Cheers.”

“Not a problem, don’t mention it.” Zayn met Liam’s gaze and held it.

“Have a nice—rest of your day, then,” Liam said, his voice going quieter.

“Yeah, you too,” Zayn said.

“We’ll chat soon.”

“We will indeed.”

Liam lingered another moment and Zayn bit back a grin, raising his eyebrows a little in question.

“Right—goodbye, Zayn,” Liam said, awkward but pleasant, and slipped out of the car, closing the door behind him.

It was by far the least pretentious, most sincere and earnest farewell Zayn had ever seen, and he was so arrested with fondness that he forgot about all of his messages for the majority of the drive, until he had nearly returned to his house in the hills.

*

The following morning, Zayn was sat at a long table in a conference room, his hands folded firmly around his large coffee. His manager and his marketing team and his label rep were sat around him, arguing and talking over one another, pointing at each other on the verge of shouting. Zayn studied the hastily scribbled Sharpie marks on his cup— _Zack_ —and bit his lip as one by one the other people in the meeting began to stand up, their voices climbing. He was the last person in the room to rise to his feet, but he did so forcefully enough to send his chair flying back behind him, flung on its wheels to collide with the conference room wall. He turned and threw the dregs of his coffee after it, and stormed out in the silent shock after the cardboard cup exploded upon impact, his Americano sprayed against the chair’s leather finish.

He took the stairs down so he wouldn’t have to wait awkwardly for the elevator, five flights to the ground floor, round and round. He knew his behavior would be seen as childish and unprofessional and problematic, but he’d been accused of far worse in his time, and had suffered enough of Brooke’s incessant berating that he doubted the impending lecture would affect him in the slightest.

He exited the side door to the alley, pushing at the metal bar forcefully, the sound ringing in the stairwell as the door flew open. When it shut, it locked behind him, leaving him alone in the alley. He considered continuing to walk from there, to keep going and not return and let them wonder what to shout at one another about if he removed himself from the equation entirely. He’d planned his dramatic exit especially poorly however, and soon discovered that his phone was still in his jacket, which was hanging in whichever closet the front desk receptionist had deposited the coats, five floors above him.

Zayn paced one way, then the other, clenching his hands into fists and biting his bottom lip hard enough in frustration to make his eyes prickle from the pain. “Fuck,” he spat.

He still had his cigarettes, the battered pack of them shoved into the front pocket of his jeans, and he dug them out, his hands shaking as he lit one up. A car with dark windows rolled past and Zayn leaned against the building, tipping his head up to exhale.

It took less than ten minutes for Amber to show up, picking her way carefully up the alley from the front of the building. Of course they would send Amber, the short, quiet assistant to his manager Brooke. The number of people Zayn actually liked in this city could be counted on one hand, and Amber was absolutely one of them. She always remembered his Starbucks order, always had her nose in a book, and always wanted to talk with him about comics. She was smart and sarcastic and not even vaguely interested in notoriety by association, which was essentially unheard of. It was more or less physically impossible for Zayn to be cross with Amber.

She kept a cautious distance from him as she approached, stopping a few steps away, folding her arms across her chest.

“Hi,” she said plainly. “Sup?”

Zayn shrugged, taking another harsh drag on his cigarette. “I’m great, yeah, how are you?”

Amber frowned at him, her tone equal parts sympathetic and reprimanding. “Zack. C’mon.”

“Just leave it, Amber,” Zayn scoffed. “Can I not have a strop in peace? Or do I need a bloody marketing strategy for that as well?”

Amber tilted her head a bit as if she was considering his question. “Alright. Strop away, I’ll wait.”

She took a few steps closer, then leaned against the wall beside him. Zayn smoked in silence for a moment, his anger slowly abating.

“Strop is not a verb, by the way.”

“Maybe it should be,” Amber argued.

Zayn pushed off the building, pacing a few steps back and forth. “How much more screaming is there gonna be when I go back in there?”

“None, if it’ll get you back in there.”

“Bollocks.”

“I don’t know what you all were arguing about, but. I know it has to get figured out today.”

Zayn pinched at the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut, leaning back against the building again. “Or what?” he asked, waving his hand in frustration. “Someone dies? The world ends?”

Amber gave him a pointed look. “You’re nowhere near that influential, Mr. Miller.”

Zayn cringed. “Don’t—call me that.”

“What’re you gonna do, though?” she asked reasonably, turning toward him, still leaning her shoulder against the building. “You have to go back in there sometime. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day or next week, and the longer this goes on, the worse it gets. It’s not just gonna go away if you ignore it.”

Zayn took one last inhale on his smoke, and flicked the end out into the alley. Amber was right and Zayn hated it.

“If you were my friend, you’d bring my jacket down.” It was a last-ditch effort and Zayn knew before the words were out that it wouldn’t work.

“Please,” Amber said, taking a step to the door, swiping her key card on the detector and pulling it open after the beep. “I’m so not your friend.”

Her delivery was deadpan and Zayn managed a meager smile. Amber continued to hold the door expectantly, and after a moment, Zayn stepped through.

*

Zayn’s manager began to personally escort him to the studio every afternoon, arriving in her black Lexus right about the time Zayn was waking up, driving him across the city and delivering him directly to the songwriters and producers he was meant to be working with. Schedules and deadlines had all been upended given Zayn’s lack of accountability over the previous several weeks, and his tendency to disappear without warning. So while he entered the studio sessions with a fragile sense of optimism, it was drowned quickly by disappointment and frustrations. He realized in a couple of days what he had always suspected; these people were professionals and thought he was a joke, a pretty face and a westernized name to be packaged and aggressively sold in a fickle but enormous market. They were merely trying to snatch up their part of the profits, and he was both their ticket and the roadblock in their way. The second time he entered the room only to have them all suspiciously and instantly go quiet, he just walked back out again as if he’d forgotten something.

He tried to phone Brooke in the corridor, her mobile ringing half a dozen times before going to voicemail. He called her office next, and Amber picked up.

“She’s on a flight for New York,” Amber explained.

“What for?” Zayn asked, bewildered. He’d seen Brooke just a few hours prior and she hadn’t mentioned the trip at all.

“To escape this hideous, vacuous excuse for a town, I’d guess. Or business, probably.”

“When’s she meant to be back?”

“Day after tomorrow.” Amber paused, her tone softening. “Are you cool?”

Zayn hesitated. He was absolutely not cool, but telling Amber that wouldn’t help anything. “Just wanted to run an idea past her. Guess it can wait.”

“How’s it going at the studio?”

“Good, yeah,” Zayn mumbled, the guilt of his lies unsettling him. “Peachy.”

“Cool,” Amber said, and Zayn was thankful she didn’t call him on it. “Want me to mention that you called?”

“Nah, s’alright. I’ll try her when she’s back, cheers.”

With Brooke on a plane to the other side of the country, Zayn walked back into the studio only to retrieve his journal and his jacket, and before anyone could even say a word to him, he left, out the door and on his own.

He didn’t feel like going home, but wanted to put some space between himself and the studios, so he hailed a cab and gave the address for a coffee shop he’d become familiar with in his first whirlwind weeks in the city. It was quiet and quirky, full of local art and vintage furniture and bulletin boards with flyers for lost pets and sublets. He’d been living in a hotel, shopping for a house, and the coffee shop quickly became the one space he could be alone without having to be by himself. He hadn’t been there in months but it was the first place he thought to go once he got into the cab.

In the late afternoon the coffee shop was busy, almost all of the tables occupied by people on their laptops, headphones on, tapping away at their keyboards, all of them working diligently on bringing some personal creation into the world. Zayn ordered an Americano and found an empty seat and flipped his notebook open, turning past pages full of old sketches and words, finding the first blank sheet.

There was a time when Zayn could scarcely keep himself in notebooks, back in Bradford when he was still making videos of himself singing cover songs and then uploading them, excited every time he’d reach more than a hundred hits. He wrote everything down back then, thoughts and phrases and the details of his dreams if he could remember them, the words winding their way across the pages between his drawings and sketches. He filled them up faster than he could buy them, stacking them up beneath his bed, flipping back through them again and again, when he was too restless to sleep.

Then he got a new laptop as a birthday gift from his grandparents, taught himself how to write his own songs on Garageband, and his entire world burst open with limitless possibility.

He never studied music properly, or art for that matter, but he always wanted to try them both, to turn his melodies and phrases and sketches into something that mattered, something real.

Now his voice was in speakers all over the world, singing someone else’s words, using an invented name, polished and shined for maximum appeal. He stared at his blank notebook page for a long time, unable to land on a thought that he wanted to commit in ink, or an image to sketch out. This had been the crux of the problem with his writing since the start. It was the reason he was hiding out in a coffee shop three blocks from the hotel he used to live in, instead of at work on his album in the studio. Brooke was going to have his head, but that wasn’t why Zayn bit the inside of his cheek to quell the threat of his tears. He could no longer reach that part of himself, the one that had him drawing and writing until his fingers went numb, looping beats and melodies into the small hours, and he couldn’t pretend anymore that it didn’t matter.

When he heard his name—his invented one—spoken quietly in a question, Zayn’s heart sank, his eyes falling shut. The last thing he wanted in that moment was a fan interaction, regardless of how well intentioned. He looked up cautiously.

“Thought that was you.”

She was tall, and seemed about his age, with a dazzling smile and long wine-red hair that fell past her shoulders. Her complexion was flawless over her high cheekbones, her eyes bright and blue when they met his, her makeup subtle but precise. She silently sank into the chair across from him, leaning forward with a familiarity that immediately unnerved him.

“How’ve you been?” she grinned, keeping her voice quiet.

He didn’t recognize her at all.

“Um,” he smiled anyhow, scanning her face over and over, trying to will himself to remember. “Alright, yeah, yourself?”

Her expression fell, and she drew back slightly. “It’s me. Harper.”

“Oh—shit, yeah, of course,” Zayn said, despite the fact that the name wasn’t helping his recollection in the slightest. He narrowed his eyes slightly in concentration. “Nice to see you. You look, erm. Different.”

“Jesus, Zack,” she said, astonished and chiding. “I stayed at your house for like, _two days straight_.”

Zayn frowned. It was possible, even probable. Back when the city was new to him, when he first moved up into his house, his directive was to see and be seen. He hosted parties that went on for days, endless rooms filled with dozens of people he didn’t know. He remembered less and less about them every day.

“Wow, okay, I’ll just go then,” Harper said, rising to her feet. “Really cool to see you, dude.”

“I don’t—” Zayn began, but had no idea what he was even trying to say. “Listen... I’m sorry.”

Harper had her phone out and snapped a photo of him before he even realized what she was doing. 

“Hey,” Zayn protested, but she was already on her way out.

He watched her go, stepping away quickly without looking back, the bell above the coffee shop door ringing cheerfully with her departure. It took him a few more minutes of staring blankly at his journal to puzzle through it, and then for the first time in weeks, he apprehensively opened Twitter on his phone and looked through his mentions. The photo was already there, of course, and when he scrolled further, he realized she’d apparently given away his exact location as well.

He wasn’t even done with his coffee, and he tried to gather his things quickly, but by the time he got outside there were already a few girls lingering on the sidewalk and they rushed toward him the moment he got through the door. He posed for some photos and signed a few things and stayed carefully polite and neutral, but each time he retreated several steps, someone else would rush in, and Zayn began to get nervous, jittery from the growing crowd and their relentless demands. Before he was able to walk away entirely, a couple of paparazzi showed up as well, shouting for his attention, cameras clicking nonstop. By the time he got in a cab he was trembling like a leaf in a storm, his chest tight with panic.

When he arrived at home, still shaken, the inside of his house was dark and quiet, the curtains all drawn the way he’d left them when Brooke had retrieved him that morning. He stood in his kitchen in silence save the barely perceptible hum of his refrigerator. His inability to remember Harper tugged at him like a snared wire; not because of the slight to her feelings, or any regrets over his earlier days of drunken debauchery, or her deliberate act of retaliation, which he didn’t really blame her for. But because it made him no better—no different—than everyone he knew and everything he’d come to despise about his life. He was no longer on the outside looking in, and he’d lost all ability to recognize who, exactly, he actually was. 

Zayn looked around the kitchen, where he scarcely spent any time, at the sterile coldness of the modern fixtures and finishes, the bright white cabinets and dark steel appliances, all of it polished to eerie perfection by hired staff he never saw. He thought about the house where he grew up: the uneven slope of the peeling linoleum flooring across which he’d slide in his socks while playing tag with his sisters; the precarious oven knobs spattered with grease that fell to the floor at the slightest touch, and the corkboard on the wall onto which his mum would pin his incessant drawings, the pages piling haphazardly on top of one another. He’d long since moved his family to a larger, better home, and he hadn’t seen the tiny place where he’d grown up in years. Stood there in the silence and detachment of his current kitchen, he was overcome with the desire to find that house where he’d spent all those years as a kid, to buy it and move there and never live anywhere else ever again.

The ringing of his phone pulled him from his reverie and made him realize his eyes had begun to prickle with tears. He was certain it was Brooke or Amber or someone from the studio and as he blinked at the screen, he steeled himself to explain his unexcused absence.

It was Liam. Zayn picked up immediately with a quiet hello.

“Zayn, hi, it’s me. Er—Liam. Is this a bad time?”

“No,” Zayn said, his voice still a bit unsteady. He cleared his throat and shifted to lean against the counter. “No, it’s fine. Hi.”

“Hi,” Liam said again, cheerful. “How are you?”

“Good, yeah,” Zayn replied, automatic. “Yourself?”

“I’m well, thanks. I just thought I’d call and see if—you know, if you were still up for—for wanting to hang out someday. Er. For the day. Sometime,” Liam fumbled. “I mean, I can come pick you up, we can make a day of it. If you want.”

Zayn traced a line with his finger against the shine of his countertop, leaving a smudge, then slowly drew a Z. “Yeah, definitely. I definitely want to.”

“Brilliant,” Liam said, his enthusiasm obvious. “When are you thinking? I’m—I’m pretty open, you know, to whenever works for you.”

“You could come now,” Zayn said.

There was a long pause before Liam spoke. “Now?”

“Yeah, or. In a bit,” Zayn said, suddenly heartened at the idea of getting out of his house again.

“Oh... erm,” Liam hesitated. “I mean. I could? It’s a little late now though, don’t you think?”

Zayn paused, blinking. “Is it?”

“Nearly five already, yeah,” Liam replied.

“Oh.” Zayn’s eyes shifted to the digital clock on the stove. “I suppose it is.”

“We could try for tomorrow, though,” Liam said, hopeful.

“Yeah?”

“Sure, yeah. If that works for you?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Zayn said. “Tomorrow, yeah.”

“Brilliant,” Liam replied. “I’ll just need to know where I can find you, then.”

Zayn blinked again a few times, his thoughts racing madly. Would it be problematic to direct Liam to his house? What would Liam presume about him? How could Zayn possibly explain living in a luxury house tucked away in the hills? If he offered to meet Liam at his bungalow, would Liam think that was even more odd? Which would be worse?

“Hello, are you there?” Liam said, when the silence had lingered too long.

“Sorry, sorry—yeah, um.” Zayn cringed under the pressure of deciding what to do.

“Are you alright?” Liam asked, his tone careful and concerned.

“No, I’m fine,” Zayn replied quickly. “Sorry, my signal’s gone bad or something. I’ll text you, yeah?”

“Okay—yeah, text it to me, your address,” Liam said, speaking louder, trusting Zayn’s story about the bad signal. Zayn’s stomach twisted sharply with guilt.

He inhaled to reply, but ended the call quickly instead, his heart hammering hard in his chest.

*

Zayn ended up making Liam pick him up at a Starbucks. The absurdity of having to call to get a car to bring him to the Starbucks well in advance of their meet-up time was not lost on him, but Zayn wasn’t quite prepared to reveal his address, and used the excuse of wanting caffeine for the road anyway. Liam had agreed without too much protesting, and by the time he stepped into the shop, pushing his aviators onto the top of his head, Zayn was halfway through his first refill, his knee jogging wildly under the table.

“Morning,” Liam grinned, sitting down in the chair opposite Zayn.

“Hey,” Zayn said, grinning in return, sitting up a little taller, fidgeting a bit. “Morning.”

Liam was in a pale yellow t-shirt covered by his brown leather jacket. It matched his eyes so perfectly it practically made Zayn dizzy. He looked bright and excited in a way that had nothing to do with caffeine, and when Zayn offered to buy him something, Liam declined politely.

“Let me guess. You’re one of those natural morning people,” Zayn said with mock disdain as they got into Liam’s Jeep.

“Well, I have to have one flaw,” Liam shrugged.

Zayn bit back a grin, turning his head to look around Liam’s car. Wedged into the back were two surfboards, and Zayn’s grin dropped away instantly.

“We’re not—you’re not putting me on one of those today, mate. It’s not happening.”

Liam frowned, turning to mirror Zayn’s gaze. “Oh—no, those are both for me,” Liam said. “Don’t worry.”

Liam maneuvered out of the parking spot and onto the road, and Zayn eyed him skeptically.

“You need two, then? Just for you?”

“I always bring two,” Liam said. “In case I lose one.”

Zayn paused, turning to look at the boards again, considering. “Really?”

Liam, it turned out, was a terrible liar, his grin spreading broadly over his face before he could even form a response. “Uh, yep.”

“I’m serious,” Zayn said, reaching over to bump the back of his hand against Liam’s thigh, trying and failing to suppress his own smile. “I can’t surf. I can’t even swim.”

“It’s alright,” Liam said, the sincerity apparent in his voice again. “We can stay on the sand, I promise.”

Zayn noticed the way Liam’s hand dropped, resting briefly on his thigh at the place where Zayn had touched him before taking hold of the steering wheel again to guide them onto the highway.

The morning was already bright and warm, and once they left the oppressive congestion of the city, Liam opened the Jeep’s sunroof and windows, the fresh breeze off the ocean filling the car and whipping Zayn’s hair into a frenzied mess.

“I haven’t done this drive in ages,” Liam said, raising his voice over the sound of the wind. “Wait ‘til we get past this next hill—it’s amazing, absolutely amazing.”

The road climbed and twisted until at the crest of the hill it curved, and finally there was nothing impeding the view all the way out across the ocean, the shoreline snaking its way onward at the bottom of the steep drop off. Zayn sat up as tall as possible, craning to see the waves as they rolled in against the rocks, and the endless expanse of the water, grayish blue where it spread out all the way to the horizon.

“Wow,” Zayn said quietly, genuinely awed.

“I know, right?” Liam said, dividing his attention between the view, the road, and watching for Zayn’s reactions. “We’re only just getting started, though.”

Liam continued northward, switching the stereo on as the road twisted and turned, the ocean rolling in on their left, and the rugged, rocky landscape peppered with glamorous homes sprawling on the right. The route hugged the coastline, and Zayn couldn’t help but take his phone out, attempting to snap a few shots out over the water. They all turned out blurry and unintentionally half-filled with Liam’s smiling profile. At the first safe place to pull over, Liam brought his Jeep to a stop and parked, turning the engine off.

“We could step out here, get a few photos,” Liam said.

Zayn had other ideas though, unbuckling his seatbelt and rising out of his seat, maneuvering upward to poke his head out through the sunroof. He scrambled a bit to step on the center console with one foot, pushing himself up further, until his shoulders and arms were through as well. Using the roof of the Jeep to keep his phone flat and steady, he took a few pictures, inhaling deeply, the warm breeze tinged with a hint of salt.

“Or that,” Liam said. “That works too, I suppose.”

Zayn smiled and looked down as Liam peered up at him through the sunroof. His sunglasses were pushed back on his head and he was biting his lip, just the corner of it caught in his teeth. Zayn allowed himself to really look at Liam, at the sporadic dark freckles on his cheeks, the sharp line of his jaw, the fullness of his mouth. He resisted the temptation to take a photo.

“Careful,” Liam said quietly, his hand hovering near Zayn’s knee, like he was not quite brave enough to touch.

Zayn was in no danger whatsoever of falling, but he backed himself into the car again, folding into his seat and settling. He ran a hand through his hair, immediately realizing the pointlessness in any attempt to fix it.

“Changing your mind yet?” Liam asked.

Before Zayn could answer, his phone began to ring, the specific tone designated to direct calls from his manager. He silenced the call quickly, but his mood darkened anyway, the sound alone evoking the reminder of everything he was evading. Zayn’s stomach twisted in worry and he fidgeted restlessly; he could already hear Brooke shouting at him. It rang again almost immediately, and Zayn scrambled to shut it off entirely.

“Did you want to take any more photos, or...?” Liam asked, a little hesitant.

Zayn was thankful Liam didn’t inquire about the calls. “Nah, I’m good. Let’s carry on.”

“There will be loads of other places later,” Liam said. “But if you want me to pull off, just say.”

“Cool,” Zayn said, taking a deep breath, pushing his thoughts of his avoided obligations from his mind. “Cheers.”

Almost an hour later they stopped at a small petrol station, the sort where the toilets require a key from the attendant and the entrance to them is around the back of the building. Zayn kept his sunglasses on and purchased a bottle of water and a chocolate bar, glancing at the row of magazines as he passed them, not even realizing he was looking for his own face among the covers until he didn’t find it, exhaling in relief.

Back in the car, Liam searched through the radio stations as he drove, the sound system switching from one snippet of song to the next.

“So I think what we should do,” Liam began, continuing to press the button to advance the tuner, finally settling on a station and leaving it be, “since it’s such a nice day, is hike along the coast at the state park, then find some lunch. Are you down?”

“Hiking, like. On trails or whatever?”

Liam smiled. “The spot I’m thinking of is easy to get to. It’s not a long hike and there’s a bit of a cliff at the top, like,” Liam explained, gesturing with his hand. “Loads of nice ocean views.”

“Sure, yeah, sounds alright.”

“I think you’ll like it a lot, actually.”

In the next moment Zayn went utterly still, a deep sense of dread coursing through him as his own song and voice suddenly filled the car, blaring loud and clearly out of Liam’s stereo. It was not his latest single, but his most popular one, nearly a year old. Zayn was just about to reach over to turn the station or shut it off entirely, but Liam was quicker, and when he made contact with the knob he only turned the volume up.

“Oh hey, I actually know this one!” Liam said, all cheer and enthusiasm, glancing over, tapping his hands against the steering wheel to the backbeat.

Zayn tried to muster a favorable reaction, but it was as if his throat was in a vice, squeezed tight by all of his panic and indecision. Somewhere in the distant past there had been excitement and celebration associated with a moment like this, hearing himself randomly on the radio. But that seemed now to Zayn like another time and another life, one to which he had no hope of ever returning.

At the chorus, Liam actually began to sing along, and for a fleeting moment beneath all the turmoil of his alarm, Zayn felt a small wellspring of elation; Liam actually knew and liked his music. He had a strong voice, too, belting out the melody shamelessly as he drove. Zayn considered delivering a hasty confession right then; he could even hear himself saying it in his mind. _Hey, so, this might seem a bit bonkers, but..._

Instead, Zayn switched the station with a press of a button, lowering the volume at the bass-heavy hip-hop track that replaced his own, his window of opportunity slamming shut. Liam immediately went quiet, frowning in confusion.

“Sorry—do you not like that one?”

“Just heard it too much, I guess,” Zayn managed, the tendrils of his panic still holding steadfastly, making his voice tight and thin, his pulse thundering in his ears.

“Well, this is nice, too,” Liam said, continuing to drum his fingers against the steering wheel.

Zayn knew he was placating, but didn’t argue. The miles rolled away behind them, and the frantic pace of Zayn’s heart receded.

*

The state park was a short drive off the highway, and the parking lot contained only a few other cars when they rolled in. Zayn was still residually nervous and edgy; their conversation had been sparse and stilted for the rest of the drive, despite Liam’s continual attempts to lure Zayn from his listlessness.

Zayn stretched when he stepped out onto the asphalt, sliding his jacket on against the light breeze. Liam stepped around to the passenger side of his car, retrieving a small backpack from his backseat, sliding it onto his shoulder.

“You sure you’re up for this?” Liam asked, his voice laced with concern. “We could absolutely go somewhere else instead.”

“No, no,” Zayn said, feeling guilty. “I’m good. I think I just—had too much caffeine or something.”

“Well, here,” Liam said, rooting around in his bag, and then handing over a bottle of water. “This should help.”

“Were you a boy scout or some such?” Zayn said with a small grin, taking the water anyway.

“I was, actually,” Liam admitted, smirking slightly. “Were you?”

“Nah,” Zayn said. “Too busy reading and drawing. Making up songs, stuff like that.”

Liam locked up the car and started in the direction of the hiking trails, slowing to allow Zayn to fall into step beside him. “You made up songs? I always wished I could do that.”

“You could,” Zayn said, plucking a cigarette from his pack and tucking it behind his ear. “‘S easy, really.”

“For you, maybe.”

Zayn shrugged. “You’d be surprised.”

The hiking trail was not difficult, just as Liam promised; Zayn even managed well enough in his boots. They made their way up gradually, ascending to the top of the coastal cliff, the wind kicking up stronger and the view opening up for miles. There were a handful of other people milling around but none of them paid Zayn or Liam any particular attention. Liam had a proper camera in his bag and snapped a few photos, of the water and the sea birds, and inland at the distant sprawl of homes. When he trained his lens on Zayn, though, Zayn’s hand flew up instinctually and he ducked out of the shot, looking away.

“Please don’t,” Zayn said at the same time Liam began to apologize.

“I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s cool, I just—”

“No, I shouldn’t have—here,” Liam said, quickly bringing the camera over, showing Zayn the screen as he deleted the blurry half-photo. “I shouldn’t have. Sorry. It’s gone.”

“Sorry,” Zayn repeated uselessly, his reactionary reticence subsiding, awkwardness setting in.

Liam studied him for a moment, brow furrowed in confusion, like he couldn’t quite work out what had just happened or why, and like maybe he was hoping for some answers. Zayn looked down and away, the profound discomfort of scrutiny unsettling him, his nerves flaring to life, making him jittery.

Liam drew in a breath as if to speak, and Zayn closed his eyes, expecting a question. The breeze kicked up just then, but Liam stayed quiet, and when Zayn looked up, Liam was tucking his camera back into his bag, carefully closing the zip. “Wanna head down to the beach now?” he asked. “Tide’s going out. There’s tide pools and everything. It’s kinda neat.”

Zayn didn’t understand how Liam kept forgiving all of his inexplicable idiosyncrasies, or why he would even bother, or how, even at that point, Zayn could begin to explain himself.

“What are tide pools?” Zayn asked quietly. “Do we have to get in them?”

“Not unless we want to,” Liam explained. “We can just look.”

Zayn met his gaze and Liam grinned, his expression strangely hopeful now. “Alright, yeah,” Zayn agreed.

He started to head back the way they’d come, but Liam’s hand on his arm halted him.

“It’s this way, I believe,” Liam said, pointing toward the edge of the bluff.

There was a narrow stairway that led them down the side of the rocky cliff to the shore below, steep but manageable. Liam descended first, and Zayn followed, stepping carefully and grasping firmly to the handrails until they reached the sand and rocks.

Zayn allowed Liam to lead, traversing the uneven dips and peaks of the wet rocks, avoiding the small pools of seawater between them, gradually moving closer to the shore. The breeze was lighter than it had been at the top of the cliff, the sound of the waves growing louder as they approached, punctuated by the echoing squawks and cries of the birds overhead.

“Ah, here we go,” Liam said, stepping up onto a narrow, curving rock ledge, and then turning to hold out his hand for Zayn.

Zayn grabbed hold of Liam and joined him on the small strip of stone, stepping up onto it. They were on the rim of a tide pool a few feet wide and only a few inches deep, the water still and clear, containing a handful of strange creatures and plants. Liam crouched down carefully to get a closer look, and Zayn followed his lead, flailing a little to keep his balance. Liam immediately reached an arm out to steady him.

“Careful, there.”

Zayn peered into the water, sliding his sunglasses up for the first time all day.

“Look,” Liam said, extending his arm and pointing. “In that little crevice there? That’s an actual starfish, I believe.”

Zayn squinted a bit. He saw a bunch of clams—or, probably clams, he wasn’t sure, as well as a small blue anemone stuck to the rocks, but nothing even remotely star-shaped.

“Where? I don’t see it.”

“Just there,” Liam said, continuing to point. “He doesn’t look much different than the rocks, really.”

All of a sudden, Zayn saw it; just the outline of a couple of starfish limbs, half-hiding right where two rocks converged, bumpy and brownish-grey. 

“Does he just live there all the time?” Zayn asked, feeling suddenly sympathetic. “Does he need help getting out?” Zayn hugged his knees, frowning.

“Nah, he just got stuck for a bit,” Liam said. “He’ll be fine in a while, once the tide returns.”

Zayn glanced up; the edge of the ocean was still a ways out, calm waves bubbling closer as they spread against the shore. When he looked over, he caught Liam watching him, his dark eyes wide with curiosity. Zayn held his gaze for a moment, the breeze fluttering Liam’s hair.

“You know, it’s strange,” Liam said, his voice gone quieter, turning his gaze out to the ocean again. “I haven’t actually been here in ages. But this is probably one of my favorite places out of everywhere in the world.”

Zayn studied Liam carefully, the shape of his face in profile, and the line of his hair over the curl of his ear. “Why’s that?”

“Loads of reasons, I suppose,” Liam said. “Coming here as a kid with my parents—before they split up, obviously. And then after, with just my mum.” Liam paused, smiling a bit. “I guess there’s only good things, you know? Happy memories. It’s just—nice,” Liam finished, a bit stilted, like he couldn’t quite put the right words together.

“Want to know what mine is?” Zayn said, gazing out toward the water again.

“Go on, then.”

“The house where I grew up, like,” Zayn began, hugging his knees a little tighter. “There was this little cupboard with a tiny door off the hallway upstairs. You could barely see it, because it was painted just like the wall, you know? I used to hide in there with my books and my comics and stuff, so no one would bother me.”

Zayn had no earthly idea why he was giving his secrets away to Liam so freely, things he hadn’t thought of or talked about in years. Crouched there on the rim of a tide pool, on a practically deserted beach at the edge of the world, it was a bit like casting a line into the water, but impossibly hoping to be the one who got caught.

*

They stayed at the tide pools well into the afternoon, the sun slowly making its way overhead. Liam led them onward in exploration along the shore, taking Zayn’s hand loosely each time they moved to a new tide pool, pausing to point out the different contents in the shallow collected waters between the rocks. Zayn crouched down beside him to peer at the tiny fish and dark-shelled mussels within the ribbony strands of seaweed, keeping close, his shoulder pressed firmly to Liam’s. Zayn startled mid-sentence when a crab suddenly scuttled over the toe of his boot, flailing his arms in alarm and letting out an undignified shout as he stumbled away from it. Liam tried not to laugh, taking hold of Zayn’s arm to steady him, his grasp firm and strong at Zayn’s bicep, keeping him from tipping back into a puddle.

“How about we get some lunch, yeah?” Liam suggested, the stifled laughter still apparent in his voice.

Zayn flushed, his eyes still darting over the rocks on the hunt for more scurrying creatures. “Uh, yeah.”

“C’mon,” Liam said fondly, sliding his hand down Zayn’s arm, lacing his fingers tightly with Zayn’s.

The press of Liam’s palm and the curl of Liam’s fingers between his own sent Zayn’s pulse racing wildly. He glanced around but the nearest people to them were probably too far off to recognize him. Zayn hoped so, anyway. Liam looked back every now and then as they traversed the rocky ground, squeezing more tightly to Zayn’s hand to steady him when the steps got more awkward.

As they approached the stairs that led back up to the bluff, there were more people, couples and families out enjoying the beach and the sunshine. No one did the telltale double take or the sustained gaze—the ones Zayn had long since grown accustomed to—that told him he’d been recognized. Still, his nerves got the best of him, and he suddenly dropped his hand from Liam’s grasp, tucking it into his pocket as they climbed up the steps. Liam glanced back in confusion, pausing slightly, but said nothing.

The place Liam picked for lunch was basically a roadside stand; a pale blue wooden structure the size of a storage shed with a walk-up window and a hand-painted sign that read _Tacos de Pescado_. Zayn wrinkled his nose in skepticism as Liam parked on the side of the road, but he was so enthusiastic and excited about the place that there was no way Zayn could protest. He left the ordering to Liam and his broken Spanish, and they sat down together at the adjacent weathered grey picnic table to have their lunch.

The tacos were beyond fantastic, and Zayn didn’t realize how hungry he actually was until he began eating. He quickly devoured the two that Liam had ordered for him, licking the last of the sour cream from his fingers, and Liam nudged at his foot under the table, smiling smugly.

“Yeah, yeah. Alright,” Zayn conceded, reaching over quick to nick a small piece of fish out of Liam’s last taco. “You win.”

“Hey,” Liam said defensively, bumping Zayn’s shin with the toe of his shoe, his brow furrowing adorably.

Zayn tucked the straw of his lemonade between his lips, smirking around it. He slid his shoe against Liam’s until their ankles were hooked together, leaving it there, his grin growing wider as Liam pressed back, smiling until his eyes narrowed with it.

They got back into Liam’s car after lunch and continued up the highway, hugging the coastline, windows down and the stereo on, talking over the music the entire way. Liam’s questions were curious but not invasive, mostly about comics and films and the places Zayn had been, filling in his own anecdotes between inquiries. It had been so long since Zayn had truly talked about himself and genuinely made an effort to get to know someone that he’d forgotten the particular thrill that accompanied it, the near-anxious elation of newly forged connection.

Liam drove onward for hours, the sprawl of civilization diminishing, and the only thought Zayn spared for going back was that he didn’t want to.

They did stop eventually, necessity pulling them off the highway to another run-down petrol station. Zayn emerged from the building to find Liam cleaning the windshield of his Jeep, stretching across to pull the rubber blade toward himself in precise strokes, his shoulders flexing beneath his t-shirt. As Zayn approached, newly acquired bottle of cold soda in hand, he reached up and pressed it directly to the back of Liam’s neck. Liam immediately flinched and squirmed, shrugging his shoulders up and spinning around quick with a surprised gasp. Zayn burst into delighted giggles.

“You—” Liam stammered, breaking into a startled grin. “I’m—” He gave up on words, growling low and playfully, and Zayn ducked into the car.

Liam was still smiling when he followed a moment later, turning the engine and lowering the volume on the stereo. 

“So I had a thought,” he began, and Zayn hummed in question. “There’s another beach I know, but it’s a bit further on, still. Would you be up for it, do you think? Or have you had your fill of me for one day?”

Zayn was just about to take a sip from his soda, but paused at Liam’s question, meeting his gaze. He wasn’t sure how to begin to explain how desperately he didn’t want to go back, or how he was nowhere near his limit of Liam’s company, if such a thing even existed.

“You’re the boss,” Zayn said instead.

“It’s not like the one from this morning,” Liam explained, like he had to justify it. “It’s much smaller, far more remote. Is that alright?”

Zayn shrugged, then nodded. “Sure, yeah. I promised you a whole day and it’s not nearly finished yet, so.”

“That is true,” Liam agreed, pulling out onto the highway once again.

“So long as you don’t abandon me there or anything.”

“Aw, see, now you’ve gone and ruined the surprise.”

Zayn smiled, swiping the back of his hand against the corner of his mouth.

“I mean, taking into consideration your tendency to wander onto strange beaches and make yourself at home, I thought—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Zayn interjected, tipping his head back onto the headrest, rolling it toward Liam.

“—you’d enjoy it, actually.”

Zayn reached over to knock the back of his hand against Liam’s thigh, and as he did, Liam took hold of it, lacing their fingers together tightly. Zayn’s chest swelled, his pulse racing hard and fast, as Liam squeezed and didn’t let go.

It was late into the afternoon when they left the highway again; turning off at a service road that appeared so fast Zayn barely saw it, but Liam knew just where to look. They made their way toward the shore, the road winding and twisting through patches of palm trees and shrubbery, turning to a gravelly path, until there was nothing left but the stretch of sand.

“We’ll have to walk from here, but it’s not far,” Liam said, killing the engine.

The air was quiet when Zayn stepped out, save the occasional cries of the sea birds overhead. They had to walk up a short hill, the sand shifting and sliding beneath their feet. Halfway up it, Liam stopped to remove his shoes and socks, and Zayn did the same, teetering precariously on one foot as he yanked at his boot, then sitting down to finish the task.

It was easier after that, in bare feet, and once they reached the crest of the hill, the shore and the ocean came into view, the waves rolling in strong against the narrow strip of sand, deserted for as far as Zayn could see. It wasn’t a large beach, just a half-moon curve tucked out of sight and probably less than a mile long.

“Oh my god, the waves are so perfect,” Liam said, sounding awed. “Come on,” he encouraged, taking off down the hill, abandoning his shoes halfway to the edge of the water.

Zayn followed, but slower, watching as Liam practically jogged to the bubbling swell of the water, pausing to reach down and hastily roll the legs of his jeans to his knees. He looked back once, a huge smile on his face, his steps easier once he hit the wet sand. Zayn hung back, staying put on the solidly dry part, keeping his distance from the approaching churn of the dissipating waves.

“Are you not even putting your feet in?” Liam asked, genuinely perplexed.

Zayn shrugged a little, still holding his boots, watching the waves swell and recede around Liam’s legs, swirling and frothing and pulling back again. “I can’t swim, so.”

Liam retreated a couple of steps, moving out of the water and toward Zayn, holding out his hand.

“I promise you won’t have to swim,” Liam said. “C’mon, it’s just your feet. It’s nice.”

Zayn was maybe five steps away, and he took them slowly, reaching up to take Liam’s hand when he got close enough.

“Don’t drop your shoes though. Or you might not see them again,” Liam smiled, and Zayn clutched them tighter to his chest.

They approached the edge of the water carefully and waited for the next wave to roll in, and Zayn automatically retreated a couple of steps as his feet disappeared into the swell of sand and cool water, soaking the ankles of his jeans. Then the momentum reversed, tugging at his heels, drawing him further in as it receded.

“See? Not so bad, right?” Liam said, holding firmly to Zayn’s hand.

“’S weird, yeah,” Zayn said, keeping his gaze downward, mesmerized by the pattern of the shift and pull, his feet tingling.

“But good weird?”

“Yeah. Good weird,” Zayn agreed, a grin tugging the corner of his mouth upward.

They picked their way along the waterline for a ways, weaving in and out of the edges of the water as the sun began its descent toward the horizon. Liam was practiced at reading the patterns in the waves, pointing out their height and curl in the near distance, practically thrumming with excitement as he explained how perfect they were for surfing, never letting go of Zayn’s hand even as he gestured and pointed, gazing longingly outward.

“We should go back for your board, then,” Zayn said. “If you wanna get out there, like.”

Liam turned quickly to meet Zayn’s gaze, his expression excitedly hopeful before falling slightly.

“Nah, it’s alright.”

“I don’t mind,” Zayn said, planting his feet so they stopped walking, pulling Liam to a stop as well. “I can tell you want to.”

“It’s cool, I surf all the time,” Liam said, entirely unconvincingly, frowning slightly as he gazed out over the water again.

“Liam,” Zayn said pointedly. “Go get your damn surfboard.”

Liam bit his lower lip, his brow furrowing with cautious hope as he met Zayn’s gaze again. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I swear,” Zayn said with a grin.

“What will you do, though? I feel bad just abandoning you. But the sun is setting, so there’s not that much time left, but—are you absolutely sure? Positively?”

“Will you just go already?” Zayn said, nudging Liam away. “I’m about to go get the bloody thing myself.”

“I’ll be—so fast, you have no idea,” Liam said, bouncing a little in place before taking off back toward where they left the car.

Zayn watched him for a moment, and then made his way back to the dry sand again, far enough out of the reach of the waves that he could sit, gazing out over the water and the intense light of the retreating sun.

When Liam reappeared, moving quickly up the beach with his board under his arm, he had changed into a pair of shorts and a faded grey t-shirt. Zayn watched as he approached the water, ducking right into it and paddling out on his board, smooth and adept in a way that fascinated Zayn endlessly. Liam was agile and controlled, making his efforts to stand and catch the curl of a wave seem painless and natural, and Zayn was filled suddenly with an empty longing, even though he’d never even considered surfing before in his life. Watching Liam drift in upright toward the sand and make his way out again over and over, Zayn realized his pining was not at all related to Liam’s specific skills and abilities, but the boundless enthusiasm which possessed him entirely, sending him out again and again. 

For the first time in months, Zayn itched for his sketchbook or his journal, his mind flooded with ideas and inspiration. The sun dipped lower and lower, sinking against the layer of clouds at the horizon, spreading across the boundless span of the water in brilliant layers of yellow, orange, and rose.

When the sky began to dim, Liam emerged from the water, walking up to where Zayn was sat, his clothes soaked and clinging, his board tucked under his arm. His hair was pushed back, wavy and dripping at his temples, a radiant smile on his face.

“Hi,” Liam said, a little breathlessly. “It’s starting to get dark.”

“So it is,” Zayn said, gazing up at Liam and the shape of him outlined by his wet t-shirt.

“Are you bored to death?” Liam asked, sheepish.

“Not even close,” Zayn said. “I like it here. Quite a lot, actually.”

*

At the car, Liam put his board away in the back and Zayn waited in the front, attempting to brush the sand from his clothes and tipping his boots upside down, making something of a mess of Liam’s floor mats. When it had been a few minutes and Liam still hadn’t appeared in the driver’s seat, Zayn turned around, peering back between the seats. He caught a flash glimpse of the span of Liam’s bare shoulders and back as Liam changed behind the Jeep, pulling on his t-shirt from earlier. Zayn turned around again quickly, facing forward, his pulse kicking up a notch.

Liam returned, combing through his damp hair with his fingers, fussing with it in his rearview reflection.

An hour into their drive back it got dark, and Zayn dozed off, arms folded across his chest and slouching in his seat, his head tipped to rest on the strap of his seatbelt. He awoke with a start, the uneasiness of anxiety arresting his waking thoughts, the realization that the sanctuary he’d built for the day was unraveling further with every return mile.

Liam had the stereo tuned to a news report at a low volume, a woman explaining the weather forecast for the next few days, all sun and pleasantness and no rain expected. Aside from the soft strains of the news talk, a tenuous and pervasive quiet sat between them like an invisible passenger. The more Zayn tried to sort out how to breach it, the more difficult it seemed; he was certain some thought would come to him, or that Liam would say something in the next stretch of the road and save him the task. But the silence only persisted and the hours rolled on until they were back in the congestion and gridlock of the city again, the traffic and the buildings closing in like a trap.

Pulling up to a stoplight, Liam looked over finally, his voice quiet and resigned when he spoke. “Would you like for me to drop you off at home?”

Zayn wasn’t expecting the question, though he probably should have been. “No. Erm...” he struggled, his thoughts racing and jumbled. 

“No?”

“I mean—it’s out of your way, so. Just. Wherever is fine.”

“I don’t mind,” Liam said, sounding a bit confused. “I mean, wherever it is. Just tell me where you need to go.”

Zayn wanted to say _back to yours_ or _anywhere at all but that empty sterile house in the hills, actually_ or something clever or funny to make Liam laugh and to erase the awkwardness that had enveloped them. Liam just looked at him inquisitively though, and didn’t say anything more.

“Maybe just...” Zayn said, fidgeting a little. “Go left at the next light, yeah?”

He gave Liam directions all the way into the hills, the only words exchanged between them, and in less than half an hour they were parked up in front of Zayn’s gate.

“I’m only staying here,” Zayn said feebly. “Temporarily.”

“I’m sure it’s very nice,” Liam said, polite and formal.

Zayn’s heart thudded uncomfortably. He didn’t want to get out of the car.

“Do you want to come in?” Zayn asked, the question coming out weaker than he intended, his mind reeling with the implications of upholding his fragile narrative, the one where Liam remained blissfully unaware of the utter chaos of Zayn’s reality.

“I should get back, probably,” Liam replied. “If—you know. If that’s alright.”

“Of course, yeah,” Zayn said, quiet and resigned. “Thanks for the lift.”

“Anytime.”

Zayn hesitated, starting to reach for the car door handle, but paused, looking up at the parallel stripes of heavy wrought iron that made up his security gate, illuminated by the headlights of Liam’s car. “And thank you for, like,” Zayn said, his voice low and quiet with sincerity. “All of today. For everything. It was really nice.”

He glanced over quickly at Liam as he ducked out of the car, barely catching Liam’s look of surprise. Zayn was two steps from the security keypad on his fence when Liam called out to him, making his way around the front of the car, his steps hurried to catch up.

“Hang on,” Liam said, stopping when Zayn turned to face him, only half a step away.

For a moment there was silence, save the steady low rumble of the car engine left running, the evening air still and quiet as they stood just outside the beam of the headlights, half hidden in the shadows.

“Me too,” Liam said. “I just—wanted to say that. About today. Me too, and thank you.”

“But I didn’t...” Zayn began, confused.

“No, I know. I mean—” Liam closed his eyes, rubbing at his forehead, mumbling almost imperceptibly. “Really bad at this, sorry.” He dropped his hand and looked up again, his words coming out in a rush. “I had—a really nice time with you today.”

Zayn’s gaze drifted sideways as a car rolled by slowly on the road, and his anxiety kicked in with the realization that anyone could be watching them, waiting, snapping photos that Zayn wouldn’t find out about for days.

“Call me soon, yeah?” Zayn said, keeping his eyes on the street.

“Would that be alright?”

“Yeah,” Zayn said, distracted, quickly coding in the numbers on his keypad to get the gate to open. “I’m definitely around, just. Call me.” The gate began its mechanical whirring, sliding open inch by inch. Once there was room enough for Zayn to fit inside it, he slipped through, finding the keypad on the opposite side and frantically pushing the red button that made it close.

“Goodnight, then,” Liam said as the gate reversed its trajectory, sliding shut again.

Zayn swallowed tightly, his throat still constricted with nervousness, and he looked up at Liam one more time. “Night,” he said, and turned toward the house without looking back.

He went inside and immediately upstairs, taking them two at a time. He pulled every flat white sheet from his linen closet and hauled them down to his sitting room, bundled in his arms. It took him a while to move the furniture out and against the walls, clearing it all away from the center of the room. He rolled up the area rug and dragged it off toward the kitchen, abandoning it halfway, and then returned to spread the sheets flat on the bare tile floor, layering them on top of one another, a stack of Egyptian cotton with a ridiculous thread count.

There was a storage shed in the back beside Zayn’s tennis court turned skateboard park, and he hadn’t been in it for months. His box of spray paints was covered in a thin layer of dust, and he hauled all of them back into the house, the cans clinking around as he set them down, right at the corner of the stack of bed sheets.

He brought in his laptop next, scrolling through his folder of unfinished song ideas, selecting a file he vaguely recalled from months ago. He put it on repeat before he started painting, pausing and going back to it as he waited for layers to dry, adding a loop, switching a beat, singing to himself. The hours passed, one after the next, prints of color peppered haphazardly on his keyboard; stripes of spray paint swirled on the sheets to the music.

*

Zayn was still awake when Brooke showed up at his door the next morning, her expression drawn tight in displeasure when Zayn let her in. Her blonde hair was pulled back, twisted and pinned into a bun, and her lipstick matched her tailored red business suit.

“Where on earth have you been? What in the hell is going on in here?” she demanded, her heels clicking on the floor. She stopped abruptly at the edge of the sitting room, gaping at the mess. 

“I ran out of blue,” Zayn said, sniffing lightly. “I mean I ran out of sheets first but I ran out of blue, you can’t make blue, I need more blue so I can finish. Did you bring me coffee?”

Brooke was speechless, her eyes slowly making their way from one sheet to the next where Zayn had left them to dry, one hung over the long rod of the curtains, another draped over the sofa, a third tacked between the stair railing and the top of a picture frame. The fourth was still on the floor, all of them a variation of an abstract crisscross pattern of horizontal lines, blues and greens and orange fading to pink.

“Holy shit, what is all of this?”

Zayn shrugged. “I felt like painting.”

“I’ve been calling you for _two days_ ,” Brooke said, exasperated. “Why didn’t you answer?”

Zayn pinched the bridge of his nose in annoyance. “I need coffee.”

“Jesus Christ, Zack. I can’t deal with this petulant bullshit, okay? Not today. Put some fucking shoes on.”

Spots swam in Zayn’s vision as he blinked at her. “Why?”

“Because we have forty-eight hours of studio time left to record the album you couldn’t be bothered to help write. That’s it, no more questions. Shoes. Car. _Now_.”

“No. I won’t,” Zayn said, folding his arms, shaking his head a little.

“You don’t have a choice.”

Zayn’s lack of sleep and multiple hours of inhaling paint fumes made his head fuzzy, his pulse echoing in his ears with his defiance. “That’s not really true, though, is it?”

“Stop. Stop making me do this. Please,” Brooke said, sounding a bit unhinged. “I just need you to focus for two days. That’s it. Just get through the next two days, track your vocals the way you’re supposed to, and I’ll leave you alone for a while.”

Zayn had heard that countless times before, and it had never once been true. And now he had paint all over his hands and his clothes and hadn’t eaten in hours, and desperately longed for the cathartic sleep that comes after significant creative output. The very last thing he wanted in that moment was to step into the studio.

“Not happening,” he said, quiet but firm. “I haven’t slept and I’m not going anywhere right now.”

“The consequences for this will be huge, Zack,” Brooke said in warning. “Huge.”

“Fuck your consequences,” Zayn said plainly, and Brooke’s mouth fell open in disbelief. “And you can show yourself out while you’re at it.”

He ignored Brooke’s protesting as he walked away, and then ignored her demands to stop ignoring her, climbing the stairs wearily and wordlessly. He walked through to the bathroom, locking himself inside, stripped down and stood under the hot spray of the shower, not caring in the least if she’d stayed or left, or what it meant either way. 

*

Zayn slept through to late evening and woke up ravenous, his throat parched. It took him a few moments to locate his phone (jacket pocket, hung on the back of a dining room chair) and after draining two full glasses of water, he turned his phone on for the first time since the previous morning.

While he waited for the multitude of notifications to roll in, he peered into his fridge, finding only a few sachets of soy sauce, a takeout container the contents of which he couldn’t identify, and the last few ounces in a bottle of flat soda. The freezer was worse, containing only a half-finished bottle of vodka and an open bag of shriveled peas.

He found a tin of beans in the cabinet and sighed, wishing for some toast to put them on, but dumped them into a bowl and microwaved them anyhow, scooping them up with a spoon and devouring them quickly while he scrolled through his missed texts, calls, and voicemails. As soon as he saw the voicemail notification from Liam, several minutes in length and only a few hours old, he played it immediately.

“Hi—Zayn? Hi. It’s me. Liam. Um. I was just calling because... well, first of all, I wanted to thank you, actually, for hanging out with me yesterday. I thought it was a really great day, and I had—a really nice time with you. Yeah. I guess I also wanted to apologize if... if I somehow made things weird, you know, at the end of the day when—when I was dropping you off at your house. I have no idea why I passed on your invitation to come in. I guess... well. Actually, that’s not true, I do know. And this is going to sound very strange I’m sure, but I don’t even know if you’ll ever listen to this, so why not, eh? I guess I just keep thinking somehow you’re going to figure out that I’m—that you’re going to figure out how boring I am. And believe me, I know how ridiculous this sounds and everything, but. You’re like—all effortlessly mysterious and you—have this way of... saying something really important and smart and then half a minute later you’re—all quiet. You’re like—a secret superhero or something. Like Batman. I can’t believe I just said that, actually. But it sort of proves the point I’m trying to make, if you think about it. So anyway... um. That’s it, I guess, for now. I really want to do yesterday over but change the end, but I can’t. If I was Superman, though, I probably could, because of that rotation of the earth trick. But I’m not, so. I’m shutting up now, this has gone on—oh god. I’m just going to hang up. I’m sorry. And thank you. I hope—you’re well. Bye.”

Zayn had been holding a spoonful of beans in his mouth for a full minute and a half, stunned into silence by Liam’s rambling message. He played it over, and then again a third time, being careful not to delete it even after he’d finished listening to it.

His finger hovered over the ‘call back’ button, but Zayn wasn’t sure what he would say. In the end he composed a text— _I’m less like Batman and more like Peter Parker maybe..._ and watched the message send, composing another right after.

_minus the redeeming bit where I save the world tho._

Zayn bit his lip and stared at the screen, taking another bite of his now lukewarm dinner of tinned beans. Liam’s reply came in quickly, Zayn’s stomach fluttering with excitement as he read it.

_I dunno maybe you just haven’t had a chance yet :) :)_

Zayn wasn’t even sure what they were talking about anymore, but not in the typical way where his instinct was to withdraw and remove himself out of indifference. Liam’s sincerity and his earnestness fascinated Zayn, even if the trajectory of their conversation bordered on nonsensical.

Before he could think of a reply, Liam sent him a photo; it was a shot of an array of comics spread over the surface of a table, arranged neatly in an arc. Zayn enlarged the photo and grinned. They were all issues of Spiderman.

_I’m going to barbecue tomorrow you should come over_ , the next text read. 

Zayn was hastily composing a reply to say he’d absolutely love to, when he suddenly backtracked, a strong wave of panic flooding through him.

_like a party?_ he typed carefully.

Zayn stared at the three blinking dots that indicated Liam was typing, and chewed on his lip in anticipation.

_haha no just me and the food unless your planning to bring someone with :)_

Zayn exhaled in relief, smiling.

_not at all. when should I show up? :)_

*

Zayn arrived nearly half an hour early, and that was after making his driver stop for flowers and then at the wine shop. Liam answered the door wearing a Batman cooking apron over his jeans and t-shirt, carrying a tea towel and smiling. As Zayn stepped in, bouquet of brightly colored flowers in one hand and bottle of vintage Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon in the other, Liam moved in close, sliding one arm around Zayn’s middle and pulling him into a quick hug as he said hello.

Between his surprise and elation and belated effort to return the embrace, accidentally bumping Liam’s arm with the wine bottle in the process, Zayn’s eyes fluttered shut at the smooth slide of Liam’s cheek against his own, inhaling quick. The sharp scent of Liam’s aftershave lingered even as he pulled away.

Zayn followed him through to the kitchen, Liam chatting at him excitedly the entire way, giving Zayn a rundown of the items he intended to cook, explaining about marinades and glazes and spice mixtures. The turquoise countertop was covered with half-cut vegetables, utensils and a cutting board, Liam’s laptop resting at the end, partially open and quietly playing an instrumental song with a dance beat that Zayn didn’t recognize.

“So you’re like, proper into cooking and all that?” Zayn said as Liam found a glass pitcher in the cabinet, using it as a makeshift vase for the flowers.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Liam said dismissively. “It’s a bit of a hobby, I guess? I’m not sure if I’m actually any good at it. I mean,” Liam added quickly, laughing lightly at himself. “Don’t let that frighten you or anything. Grilling isn’t, you know, that big of a deal. Simple, really.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Zayn said, watching as Liam poked at the arrangement, moving and re-tucking the flowers, tugging out a broken daisy, discarding it on the countertop. “I had a tin of beans for dinner last night, so.”

“Well, that’s rubbish,” Liam said, bemused.

Zayn shrugged, reaching over to pick up the broken flower, separating it completely from the long end of its stem, leaving a short tail beneath the bloom. “I’m alright with a microwave.”

“Not even in a saucepan?” Liam said, the tone of his voice climbing in disbelief. “Did you at least put them on nice slices of toast?”

“Nope.” Zayn twirled the daisy between his thumb and forefinger, back and forth, watching the circle of slim white petals spin to a blur one way, then the other. “No toast at all.”

“Well then I amend my answer,” Liam said. “By those standards, I’m essentially a cooking professional.”

“I’ll keep my expectations lofty, then,” Zayn said, and without thinking, held the small, short daisy out to Liam.

By the time his brain caught up with his actions, Liam had already taken the flower and tucked it behind his ear, beaming with happiness, leaving Zayn a bit bewildered and delighted all at once.

“Um,” Liam fumbled, still grinning huge as he looked away and gestured toward the fridge. “There’s beer and soda in there, if you’d like.”

“Cheers, yeah,” Zayn said, brushing past Liam to reach for the door handle, catching another hint of Liam’s aftershave as he passed.

There was a light breeze rustling the tops of the palm trees, the fresh air warmed by the late afternoon sun. Zayn sat at Liam’s patio table, slowly nursing his beer and a cigarette while Liam tended to the barbecue grill. He produced large plates of marinated meats from the kitchen one after the other, along with skewers of shrimp and vegetables, more food than Zayn could probably put away in a week’s time. All the while Liam relayed anecdotes about the last time he’d gone to Hawaii for a surfing competition and stayed an extra two weeks just for the amazing food. He kept throwing glances over his shoulder at Zayn as he spoke, that small daisy still tucked behind his ear. Zayn grinned, biting at the corner of his lip, picking the corner of the label on his beer bottle with his thumbnail.

“Have you ever been to Hawaii?” Liam asked, still busy arranging and re-arranging the items on the barbecue. “They do this magical thing with banana leaves where they make a pocket and cook things inside them, fish and whatnot. It’s amazing.”

“Can’t say I have, no.”

“Really?” Liam asked, surprised, finally lowering the lid on the grill and then joining Zayn at the table. “You should definitely go. It’s so beautiful, and, like. Completely relaxing.”

“Yeah,” Zayn agreed, nodding a bit. “Maybe I will, sometime.”

Liam excused himself to go inside again, and Zayn sipped at his beer, apprehensively pulling his phone from his pocket to check it. He’d already ignored all of Brooke’s caps lock texts and calls all day, and several other calls from unknown numbers, watching his voicemail notifications climb into the double digits. Distantly, Zayn knew he should address it, just make the return call and deal with Brooke and redeem himself as best he could, putting the week behind him in an attempt to move forward. Instead, he turned his phone off completely, watching it power down and go black in the relative serenity and quiet of Liam’s patio.

Liam brought out two place settings, carrying the dishes and silverware with one hand, holding the pitcher-bouquet in the other, and Zayn stood up quickly to help.

They stayed there on the patio until the sun began to descend, conversing over dinner and the wine Zayn had chosen, easily finishing the bottle between them, eating until Zayn thought he would burst. The sky darkened to shades of plum and indigo overhead, the last streaks of orange and red bleeding out along the horizon.

“Let’s go watch the sunset, yeah?” Zayn said, standing up, downing the last half-glass of wine. His limbs were loose and light, the warmth of his buzz spreading slowly as he stepped toward the beach with Liam right behind him.

Liam cleverly left his shoes on the patio, but Zayn stumbled through the sand in his boots for a ways before stopping to remove them. He dropped them right in that spot and then carried on, the cool sand pushing up between his toes. There wasn’t much sunset left to see, the remaining light more of a deep reddish glow, casting long shadows. Tiny white points of stars had already started to appear in the gradient of blue to black above. They weren’t quite halfway to the water when Zayn stopped walking, lifting his gaze and turning in a slow circle to take in the sky and the lights of the houses in the distance, all the way around to face the horizon again.

“I think I get it now,” Zayn said quietly, just barely above the soft swell of the waves rolling in.

“Hrm?”

“Like, why you live here. I think I get it.”

“Aha,” Liam said, grinning. “Mission accomplished, then.”

“Maybe so.”

Liam’s hand brushed against his, then bumped it deliberately, Liam’s fingers sliding and curling between Zayn’s.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Liam said, low and reticent with sincerity, his hand twitching in Zayn’s grasp.

Zayn took a half step back, tugging at Liam’s hand a little, bending at his knees to sit right back onto the sand, pulling Liam down beside him.

“Me too,” Zayn said, pressing close as they settled, the sky and the sea and the air and Liam’s arm falling around him like an anchor.

The remaining light in the distance dissipated, the coolness of the breeze no longer interrupted with a reprieve of warmth as the evening rolled in. Liam was warm beside him though, solid and pressed snugly against Zayn, shoulder to hip, Liam’s arm draped around him firmly, his hand curled at Zayn’s waist. Zayn closed his eyes and tilted his head slowly until it rested against Liam’s shoulder, inhaling slow and deeply, taking in the scent of the sand and the sea and Liam’s aftershave again.

Liam tipped his cheek against Zayn’s forehead, and for a long moment Zayn just listened to Liam’s breathing, as steady and strong as the sound of the ocean, in and out ceaselessly. Liam’s lips were soft when they brushed Zayn’s forehead, the barest touch, but it caused Zayn to shiver slightly, his breath catching. He started to turn his face upward, and the next press of Liam’s lips landed on the bridge of his nose. Zayn blinked quickly a couple of times, his toes curling in the sand in anticipation, tilting his head so that Liam could easily reach Zayn’s mouth with his own.

Liam paused there though, lingering a breath away, and Zayn’s pulse soared insistently, heavy and quick in his ears as he waited for Liam’s mouth to drop onto his own. It was only a few seconds at most, but it was enough that when Liam finally did kiss him, his lush lips fervent and solid against Zayn’s mouth, Zayn choked on a whimper, elation coursing through him like a live current.

At first Liam kissed him slowly, a steep contrast to Zayn’s restless urgency, the press of Liam’s lips deliberate and unhurried. Zayn shifted to try to press closer, more insistent, but Liam only pulled back gradually, nipping lightly at Zayn’s lower lip before meeting his gaze.

“Is this okay?” Liam murmured. His fingers squeezed tighter at Zayn’s side.

Zayn was nodding before Liam’s words were even out, chasing the kiss, bumping their noses together in the process. Liam huffed out a little laugh, smiling and kissing the corner of Zayn’s mouth, light and playful.

“Wanted to do this for ages,” Liam said against Zayn’s skin, quiet and confessional, pressing a few slow kisses to his face.

Zayn brought his hand up to Liam’s cheek, holding him still to kiss him properly again, making a small pleading sound against Liam’s mouth. Liam’s tongue flickered against Zayn’s lips, deepening the kiss, and when Zayn moved his hand to the back of Liam’s head, the little daisy tucked behind Liam’s ear came loose and fell right into his fingers.

Zayn held on to it, cupping his hand around it loosely so as not to smash it, and followed Liam’s tongue with his own.

Liam kissed him like they had all the time in the world, and like they’d spend every minute of it mapping and re-mapping the innumerable ways their mouths could fit together. Zayn grew restless, shifting in the sand in an attempt to press closer, his pulse rushing in his ears, their breathing and the hushed and distant surf melding into an indistinguishable wall of sound. Liam kissed him until Zayn’s lips ached, tingling sharply in their shared air, warm and stinging.

“Wow,” Liam whispered against Zayn’s mouth, and then drew back a tiny bit, the corners of his mouth drawn upward in a grin. “Hi.”

Zayn’s breath tumbled out of him, almost a laugh as he matched Liam’s grin with his own. Even in the dark Liam’s eyes seemed bright, sparkling as his gaze flickered over Zayn’s face.

“Hi,” Zayn echoed, wetting his lips quick with a swipe of his tongue.

Liam kissed him again, short and restrained, eyes staying open this time. Zayn’s heart knocked hard in the cage of his chest, like when he was sixteen and skipping class just to find out what snogging a boy could do for him. Liam’s touch—a brief, light brush of his knuckles along the plane of Zayn’s cheek—coaxed his eyes shut once more.

If everything printed in the papers were to be believed, then Zack’s sexual proclivity was exceptional, even by Hollywood standards. Zayn’s reality, however, was a considerable distance from that perception. He’d been ‘linked’ to anyone and everyone who’d ever set foot in the same room as him—as if proximity to another person, or even a conversation, was some sort of irrefutable evidence of a hidden, torrid affair. People were eager to move in and out of his periphery, more or less whenever he wanted them to, but it was always with the barrier of deceit dividing them. They liked Zack, and wanted Zack, and of course always called him Zack. At first Zayn didn’t think about it at all, then he taught himself to ignore it, and then it became no longer worth the effort. 

Somewhere amidst all of his guessing and second-guessing at everyone’s motives and intentions, he’d lost track of exactly how much he enjoyed kissing. Liam was unknowingly making a valiant effort to remind him, urging Zayn onto his back on the sand, moving over him slowly, humming quietly in question, the sound buzzing against Zayn’s lips. 

Zayn replied with a yielding whimper, reclining easily and pulling Liam close, his mind a silent, eager refrain of _yes, yes, yes_.

Liam settled on top of him, his thigh sliding between Zayn’s, forearms tucked tightly against Zayn’s sides, the warm weight of him mitigating the coolness of the breeze and the sand. Zayn lifted his head to meet Liam in a kiss, surprised at the urgency with which Liam kissed him this time, no longer tentative and exploratory, but arduous and demanding, rough nips of his teeth against Zayn’s lips between deep strokes of his tongue.

Zayn was a mess of contradictions; skin prickling with heat, aching with pleasure, heavy with weightlessness. His head was swimming, a little from the wine, and a lot from the unchecked intensity of being under Liam, in the sand, out in the night air. He let his hands wander along Liam’s back, up to his shoulders, and down against the back of his jeans. He groaned as Liam rocked his hips down, heavy pressure and friction right where Zayn needed it.

Liam shifted his weight slightly and rolled his hips again, drawing another desperate sound from Zayn’s mouth. Zayn drew his knee up, pushing his foot into the sand for leverage, grinding up against Liam.

Liam ducked his head to press his mouth to Zayn’s throat and neck, breathing hard and heavy as they moved together, Zayn’s hands curling into tight fists in the fabric of Liam’s shirt. Zayn opened his eyes briefly, blinking up at the sky, clear pinpoints of stars scattered in the expanse of blue and black above.

Liam kissed him again on the mouth, full and hard and loaded with promise, before drawing back to meet his gaze, stilling his hips.

“Should we go inside?” Liam asked, breathless. His lips were pink and full, his eyes wide and dark as they stared at Zayn’s, desperate for affirmation.

Zayn nodded, his gaze flickering down to Liam’s throat, and the edges of his collarbones at the neck of his t-shirt. 

“I want to touch you,” Liam continued, ducking in quick for another kiss, keeping Zayn’s lower lip sucked between his own for a second as he drew back again. “But without—all this sand in the way.”

Zayn could only grin in response, his heart already jackhammering in his chest, his cock twitching once in his jeans, just at the thought of Liam’s hands on him.

Liam kissed him again, and then once more, and just when Zayn began to wonder if he’d changed his mind about moving inside, Liam hopped up decisively, brushing his hands on his thighs before holding one out to help Zayn off the ground.

In the short time it took them to make their way back to the house—a minute or so at most—the prodding of Zayn’s conscience began, his nerves prickling and his stomach twisting, needling reminders that he was deliberately withholding a large part of his reality. He walked behind Liam, following him toward the patio and through to the kitchen, Liam’s hand linked firmly to his. 

Zayn took a deep breath as they continued along the hallway, stepping through into the dark stillness of Liam’s bedroom, working up the nerve to begin the conversation.

Liam turned around to face him, still holding tight to Zayn’s hand, and spoke before Zayn even had the chance, taking the very words out of Zayn’s mouth.

“I should tell you something,” Liam said, and all of Zayn’s fretful thoughts stuttered to a halt, crumbling.

“What?” Zayn searched Liam’s face, confused.

“I just think you should know that I’m,” Liam faltered, huffing out a nervous laugh. His hand in Zayn’s grasp twitched a little, tense and clammy. “It’s not a huge deal or anything, I’m just. I’m not particularly—fond, I suppose, of casual flings and such, you know?”

Zayn raised his eyebrows as Liam carried on, barely pausing.

“I mean—I know we’re just—that we’re only just getting to know each other and all of that, and I’m not—I don’t mean this to be a thing, where we have to be a certain thing before we can—that’s not what I mean, you know? I just thought I should mention it now, because it seems to be—quite common, I suppose, with people I’ve met, that it’ll seem really good, we’ll be having a lovely time, and then suddenly I just—somehow I never hear from them again.”

Zayn waited a moment to see if Liam would continue. “Okay,” he said, giving Liam’s hand a little squeeze. 

“God, I probably sound like an absolute knobhead,” Liam said quickly, squeezing his eyes shut, and then sighed heavily. “Any chance we could rewind five minutes, or?”

“No, it’s fine,” Zayn said, taking another deep breath. _There’s something I should tell you, too_ , his mind helpfully supplied, but his tongue refused to move, the words playing over and over, stuck in his throat and unspoken.

“I just—I really like you, Zayn,” Liam said, quiet and sincere, the self-deprecation and facetiousness gone from his voice.

Zayn’s heart stammered, and Liam moved closer, shuffling right up into Zayn’s space, warm and solid and real. 

“I really do,” Liam said again, even quieter, sliding his arms around Zayn’s waist.

Zayn inhaled deeply just before Liam kissed him again.

“Me too,” Zayn murmured, the echo of his name in Liam’s voice quelling all of his other thoughts.

The half-truth that Liam knew, Zayn decided, was the half no one else did, and was the only one that actually mattered.

They undressed each other slowly, stood there in the dark at the foot of Liam’s bed, eagerly exploring newly exposed skin with wandering fingers, lips, and gazes. Liam had a sparse patch of chest hair that trailed down the center of his torso, to his navel and lower, and Zayn traced it with his fingers, undoing Liam’s jeans and letting them drop to the floor, tugging his boxers down after them.

Liam groaned when Zayn finally touched him, his fingers curling firmly around Liam’s cock, thumbing at the slick head of it. He was still trying to work on Zayn’s jeans, the snug fit of them prohibiting any quick progress, until Zayn eventually let go and flopped back onto Liam’s bed, lifting his hips to push them down and away, his underwear going right with them. Liam reached out to help, tugging at one of the cuffs, yanking at it until Zayn’s first leg was free, then the other.

Zayn sat up partway, propping himself on his elbows and forearms, and Liam was already moving over him, hands and knees, his gaze fixed on the dark ink of the heart tattoo at Zayn’s hip. He reached out and touched it, his fingers vaguely tracing the shape, and he lifted his gaze to Zayn’s.

“I like this, it’s cool,” Liam said. 

Zayn grinned a little, the corner of his mouth twitching with it. “Cheers.”

“Do you have others?”

“Might do,” Zayn replied, deliberately vague. “You should find out.”

“Hmm,” Liam grinned, moving closer, ducking in for a long kiss. Zayn tipped his head back as it deepened.

Liam kissed the dip of Zayn’s throat next, then his chest, trailing wet presses of his lips against Zayn’s skin. Zayn breathed harder, choking on a whimper as Liam grazed a nipple with his teeth, soothing it with a stroke of his tongue.

He continued to kiss down Zayn’s body, over the sensitive skin of his stomach, eventually backing off the bed again, dropping to his knees on the floor. He bent forward to kiss and suck at Zayn’s tattoo, like he could taste it if he only tried hard enough.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” Liam muttered, stroking once along Zayn’s inner thigh before taking hold of his cock, fitting his hand around it.

Zayn shuddered, his hips twitching to stay still. “Don’t stop,” he replied, tilting his head to rest it on one shoulder, keeping his gaze on Liam.

Liam teased him with touches, idly stroking him while he kissed Zayn’s hips and thighs, parting them with his hands to settle between them, biting lightly at the creases where they met. He lifted Zayn’s balls, rolling them gently, breathing warm over them before brushing them with his lips. Zayn watched and whimpered and quivered, every kiss and caress making him impossibly harder, his cock taut and rigid, straining with thick drops of precome against his lower belly.

Liam lifted Zayn’s length, licking a thick stripe up the underside, then another, slower and warmer, dragging his lower lip against it. Zayn moaned shamelessly at the sudden wet warmth followed by the firm grip of Liam’s hand squeezing and stroking him. Liam fit his lips around the head of Zayn’s cock, moaning eagerly as he took him in until his mouth met the ring of his fingers.

Zayn could barely catch his breath, clutching fistfuls of the bedcovers as he watched Liam suck him off, whimpering desperately at the pressure of his lips and his tongue, and the way the head of his cock pushed at the back of Liam’s mouth when Liam took him in deep.

“Fuck, yeah,” Zayn whined as Liam settled into a rhythm, working his mouth up and down against the stroke of his fingers at the base of Zayn’s cock.

Zayn reached down with one arm, wanting to touch, his hand coming to rest on Liam’s shoulder. Liam looked up, hardly pausing his movements, raising his eyebrows slightly. He pulled off with a small wet sound, breathing hard as he mouthed at the tip, his full lips flushed and glistening against it.

“Should I do it differently?” Liam said quietly, his hand moving in full, slow strokes, audible with slickness.

“No, it’s good,” Zayn said, his eyes fluttering shut with a moan, a sudden wave of pleasure startling him. “So good, Liam, fuck.”

Liam groaned quietly, turning his head to suck briefly at the tender skin on the inside of Zayn’s thigh. He shifted up again, holding Zayn’s cock at the base with two fingers and his thumb as he took him back into his mouth.

Zayn had to recline fully, his arms and his stomach aching from the tension of keeping himself half upright, but he moved his hand into Liam’s hair, fingers carding into the soft waves of it. Liam kept moving, his head and his mouth and his hand all working together, and Zayn’s climax built steadily, evident in his moaning and breathing and the way his muscles quivered, his back arching as Liam never let up.

“H-hey—” Zayn muttered by way of warning, his voice unsteady, and his fingers twitching in Liam’s hair. “Oh—oh fuck, Liam—I’m gonna come—”

Zayn held his breath, choking back a whimper, his entire body shuddering with the effort to hold out, but Liam didn’t stop, just moaned eagerly around Zayn’s cock, a muffled reverberation that Zayn felt more than he heard, the sensation of it sending him right over. He exhaled hard, gasping and moaning as he came, filling Liam’s mouth as Liam worked him through it, his cock pulsing again and again, subsiding as Liam gradually went still.

There was a long moment when Zayn couldn’t hear anything except the sound of his own breathing and his heartbeat thundering in his ears. He drew in a sharp breath, twitching slightly as Liam pulled off, looking down to watch as Liam swallowed heavily, swiping the back of his fingers over the plush seam of his mouth. Zayn met his gaze and reached for him, making a vague gesture with his hand that Liam should join him on the bed, still a bit beyond words.

Liam grinned and averted his gaze, almost modest. He climbed up over Zayn again, dropping a kiss in the center of Zayn’s chest on the way.

Zayn slid a hand up Liam’s arm, over his shoulder to the back of his neck, and lifted up to meet him for a kiss, lingering insistently until Liam parted his lips, letting Zayn lick into his mouth. Liam groaned a little, pulling back slowly.

“My turn, yeah?” Zayn said quietly, running his hand down Liam’s chest and abs, briefly ghosting his fingertips along the length of Liam’s cock.

“Yeah? Do you want to?” Liam’s voice was wrecked, the rough cadence of it making Zayn squirm a little as he nodded in reply.

“Lie back,” Zayn said, nudging at Liam’s hip.

Liam sprawled on his back on the bed with his head on the pillows, and Zayn turned over to settle between his thighs. He stretched out as he ran his hands upward from Liam’s knees, over the contours of his lean muscles, against his sparse hair, glancing up nervously. Liam’s cock was flushed and full, thick against his lower stomach and the dark patch of coarse hair there. Liam slid his hand across his own chest and down the center of his torso to the flat plane of his abs, stopping short of taking hold of himself, stifling a small moan, his hips twitching.

Zayn wasted no time with teasing, wetting his lips as he took Liam into his hand, dropping his jaw open as he fit his mouth around the head of Liam’s wide cock, taking him down inch by inch. Liam groaned, a long, low sound of relief, and Zayn closed his eyes, finally going still when Liam nudged at the back of his throat.

He started with long, slow, strokes of his mouth, moving down over Liam as far as he could and then sliding up partway, keeping the ring of his lips sealed tight, his hand squeezing firmly at the base but otherwise staying still. He listened to Liam’s hard, heavy breathing; the random flicker of his tongue or slight stroke of his hand evoking little moans and whimpers that urged him onward. Liam continued sliding his hand flat against his own torso, up and down, almost mindlessly, and Zayn shifted a little to take over, running his free hand up from Liam’s hip, over his ribs and his chest, making Liam arch and groan.

“Oh my god, Zayn—” Liam uttered, hushed with restraint. 

Zayn glanced up through his lashes, their eyes meeting briefly when Zayn’s hand paused over Liam’s heart, his pulse pounding hard against Zayn’s palm. He kept it there for a moment, falling into a steady, determined rhythm with the movement of his mouth, and then Liam quickly gathered Zayn’s hand up in his own, lacing their fingers together, holding on tight.

Liam didn’t let go, not even once, keeping a tight hold of Zayn’s hand as Zayn stroked and sucked and worked Liam over until his jaw began to ache and his lips tingled, numb from the friction. He pulled off briefly to catch his breath, letting his hand take over as he swallowed heavily, and Liam lifted his hips with a desperate whine, trembling with tension.

“Zayn—” Liam said, strained, squeezing tight to Zayn’s hand, shuddering hard.

Zayn had barely fit his lips over Liam’s cock again when Liam came with a surprised gasp, pulsing heavy and sudden into Zayn’s mouth, his hips twisting up even further.

“Oh— _ahh_ —fuck—” Liam managed, before trailing off into the incoherence of whines and moans, still clutching impossibly tight to Zayn’s hand.

Zayn pulled off as Liam subsided, the tension draining out of him, his hips lowering to the bedcovers again. He had to swallow twice, the sharp, salty taste lingering thick in the back of his throat. Liam kissed the back of Zayn’s hand, breathing hard, and then pulled him closer.

*

Zayn woke up to the rustling of bed sheets and the jostling of movement beside him; he was on his stomach on the edge of the bed, his arms folded beneath the pillow, face turned toward the small bedside table. The curtains were drawn and the room was dim and quiet. It took him a minute, blinking blearily, to remember that he was at Liam’s, and another moment to lift his head and turn it around.

Liam was already smiling small, curled up on his side and facing Zayn, and he propped his head in his hand, elbow on the pillow, while Zayn was still sorting out how to keep his eyes from closing again, yawning into his fist.

“Morning,” Liam said, quiet and fond. “How are you?”

Zayn dropped his head to the pillow again in defeat, giving in and letting his eyes close, his limbs still sluggish with sleep.

“Dunno yet.”

Liam chuckled softly. “Fair enough.”

Liam’s fingertips trailed over the curve of Zayn’s shoulder, down under his arm, to the side of his body. Zayn kept his eyes closed, his skin prickling with Liam’s touch, Zayn’s mouth turning up a bit at the corner.

“Are you a card player?” Liam asked, his fingers going still, then tapping lightly against Zayn’s side.

It took Zayn a minute to sort out that Liam had found his other tattoo, the one with the crown and his initials that looked like a playing card. He opened one eye just a fraction.

“Nah. S’just, like. An expression.”

Liam tilted his head a bit. “Tricks up your sleeve or something?”

Zayn hummed in dissent. “Keep them close,” he murmured, tucking his arm against his side. “Coffee?” he asked hopefully.

Liam furrowed his brow in concentration, his gaze darting upward in thought. “I think—oh, yes, I still have some, actually.”

“Sick,” Zayn grinned, burrowing into the pillow again.

“You look,” Liam began, leaning in close, and then dropping a swift kiss on Zayn’s shoulder, “kind of amazing right now, to be honest.”

Liam didn’t wait for a response, just slid quickly out of bed and to his feet, padding away in his black boxer briefs while Zayn watched.

By the time Liam returned, mug of steaming coffee in his hand, Zayn had coaxed himself awake enough to sit upright, leaning back against the headboard, folding his legs up. Liam slid the curtains open on his way in, bright daylight flooding into the room, making Zayn squint.

“Thanks so much, cheers,” he said, taking the coffee carefully from Liam, their fingers bumping and sliding together with the exchange.

“No worries,” Liam said, settling carefully on the edge of the bed, turning so he was facing Zayn.

Zayn cradled his cup of caffeine, peering over it to meet Liam’s gaze and sipping at it cautiously. It was warm and sugary, lightened with just enough milk.

“Do you have any plans for today?” Liam asked, his tone reserved, smoothing out the bedcovers.

Zayn blinked, lowering the mug a bit. “Not particularly,” he said, pushing away the anxious worry of his avoided obligations. “But I can be out of your way soon, if I need to be.”

Liam looked up sharply, surprised. “That’s not—I didn’t mean you have to be, not at all. I was just being nosy I suppose.”

Zayn grinned a little. “What are your plans for today, then?”

Liam smiled, fussing with the bedcovers again. “Don’t know really. Nothing especially pressing.”

Zayn took another sip of his coffee, keeping his gaze on Liam.

“You can stay as long as you’d like,” Liam added quietly, his hand finding Zayn’s ankle, grasping it loosely through the covers.

“Don’t say that,” Zayn mumbled, aiming for deadpan, falling slightly short. “Or you might never get rid of me.”

Liam held his gaze for a long moment, but instead of saying anything in return, he tipped forward and moved up the bed, leaning in to press a kiss to Zayn’s lips, firm and lingering.

Zayn could have easily stayed in bed for hours yet, but Liam was clearly not one to loiter; once he was awake he wanted to be up, buzzing with morning energy as he disappeared again into the kitchen. Zayn let the caffeine work its way into his system and eventually roused himself, pulling his shirt over his head before shuffling out of the bedroom after Liam, bringing his coffee mug along.

The kitchen was even brighter, sunlight streaming in the windows and glass doors, and Liam was humming quietly to himself, tidying the dishes and assembling an array of items onto the counter, fruits and juices, a box of cereal, a half-full container of milk.

“Are you a breakfast person?” Liam asked, adding the remaining half of a loaf of bread to the collection. “I wasn’t sure what you might like, so.”

Zayn’s gaze flickered over to a white pastry box at the end of the counter and he nodded toward it.

“What’s that, then?”

Liam followed his gaze and then reached for the box. “Oh—these were meant to be for dessert last night. Macarons. They’re from my favorite bakery downtown.” He lifted the lid, revealing a collection of bright round cookies, sandwiched with creamy filling.

“Yeah, those sound alright.”

“For breakfast?” Liam grinned, puzzled. “Fancy biscuits?”

Zayn shrugged. “Yeah. Why not?”

Liam looked down into the box, and then nodded in agreement. “Alright, then. Should I bring out the custard as well?”

Zayn reached for a cookie. “Probably so.”

*

They ate their breakfast of biscuits and custard slowly in Liam’s front room, curled up on the sofa, discussing the best desserts and their favorite breakfasts and Liam’s aversion to spoons, which left him scooping custard from his bowl first with a fork, and then with the edges of his cookies. Zayn admitted in turn that he was scared of heights and large birds, which Liam insisted was much more common and not nearly as silly as being scared of spoons, and Zayn couldn’t argue very much with that. He set his empty bowl as far away on the coffee table as possible, leaning far over to do so, and when he moved back again, Liam reached for him, pulling him close, meeting him for a kiss.

It took Zayn a few moments to sort out exactly what was different, why simply kissing Liam there on the sofa made him so instantly breathless, and why the resurgence of his desire to do so had his throat closing off, chest seizing up with trepidation even has his heart pounded wildly within it. It wasn’t specifically that it was Liam—Zayn had been fighting the urge to abandon his biscuits and custard breakfast and snog Liam senseless all morning long—and it wasn’t any residual anxiety about his unanswered business calls, either. This was nothing to do with that; it was different, deeper somehow, and as Liam reclined a little and Zayn fit himself right up against Liam’s body, Liam’s arms sliding firmly around him, it finally dawned on him.

“You okay?” Liam murmured, his voice low and quiet.

Zayn pulled back enough to meet Liam’s eyes, his gaze flickering downward, to the curve of his lower lip and the scattering of dark stubble above his mouth. There were tiny freckles across Liam’s nose and the tops of his cheeks, little remnants of the sun that matched the permanent mark on his throat, and he tilted his head at Zayn curiously, his eyebrows pinched together.

“What is it?” Liam asked, his hand at Zayn’s lower back sliding up an inch against his shirt, then back again.

“Nothing,” Zayn whispered, fondness cascading over him, easing the tightness in his chest. “I’m just—absolutely completely sober right now.”

Liam smiled, his eyes narrowing with it, sliding his hand against Zayn’s back a few more times in slow sweeps. “I should hope so. I mean,” Liam peered at him curiously again. “Er—hang on. Are you not, usually?”

“Well, generally—” Zayn began, shifting a little, Liam’s hands clenching at his back as their hips slid together, “I mean, in general I usually am, yeah, but. Been awhile since I snogged anyone like this. I guess.”

Liam raised an eyebrow, the corners of his mouth turning down into a partial pout. “You’re not going to make me get up and make you a drink or anything, are you?”

“What? No,” Zayn said, ducking his head to hide his face, resting it against Liam’s shoulder. “I’m just saying, like.”

Zayn’s cheeks flushed with warmth at his admission. Liam’s hand drifted all the way up Zayn’s back, tracing his spine with the tips of his fingers, onto the bare skin of his neck and up into his hair, gentle pressure.

“Good. Because I’d quite like to stay right here,” Liam said, tracing circles on the back of Zayn’s head. “And continue to snog you for the rest of the day. If that’s alright.”

Zayn smiled against Liam’s neck, pressing a kiss there, a tiny thrill racing through him when Liam inhaled sharply, shuddering.

“Please do,” Zayn replied.

*

Their mid-morning intentions to stay all day on the sofa were abandoned fast; t-shirts were discarded in short order, leaving nothing but warm skin, the tight hold of flexing limbs, the thin fabric of boxer briefs and the insistent momentum of continual friction. Liam frantically moved his hands to Zayn’s hips, fingers digging in tight enough to bruise, holding him still long enough to insist that they move back to the bedroom. But even that plan was discarded halfway down the hall, when amongst staggering, bruising kisses, Liam pinned Zayn to the wall so fast and hard it knocked a framed photo to the floor in a shallow crash. In the subsequent moment of distraction, Zayn finally got his hand down the front of Liam’s briefs, pushing the fabric aside and away, palming the slick head of Liam’s cock before folding his fingers around it and stroking him hard and fast. Liam groaned desperately, his knees giving out a bit, leaning in where his hand was planted just beside Zayn’s shoulder.

Liam’s free hand was clumsy with distraction, pulling at Zayn’s waistband to tug his cock out, Zayn’s hips pushing forward from the wall as he whimpered. Liam’s hand closed around his length and Liam’s forehead tipped against his own, both of them looking down to watch as they fell into a steady rhythm, their hands a frantic blur of movement beneath the shiny pink heads of their cocks.

Liam’s breathing grew shorter and deeper, and Zayn watched the flex of Liam’s thighs where they pressed against his own, feeling the quiver in the tension of his muscles. Zayn reached up with his free hand and curled it tight at the back of Liam’s neck.

“If we don’t stop I’m gonna come,” Liam said all at once, the words falling out of him between heavy exhales, breathy and strained, his hand around Zayn pausing for a fraction of a second before continuing.

Zayn groaned, the change in pace and pressure bringing him dangerously close to his own climax, his concentration focused on his own stroking and the way Liam’s length pulsed harder in his grasp. “Liam—”

“I’m gonna come right here,” Liam whimpered desperately. “Oh god, oh fuck—”

Liam shuddered with a groan, and the first thick spurt of his come sprung up between them, landing warm and wet against Zayn’s stomach. Zayn’s hips jerked in response, and he was coming before Liam could finish, spilling over Liam’s wrist and fingers, squeezing the back of Liam’s neck as they subsided.

They shared the air between them in heaving breaths; foreheads still pushed together, their hands unwinding slowly. Liam pressed in closer and found Zayn’s mouth with his own, kissing him thorough and lazy while Zayn whimpered.

“God,” Liam whispered in awe.

Zayn managed a small grin, wincing a little at the sliding stickiness where their hips met.

“I think,” Liam said, interrupting himself and kissing Zayn again, a quick pull at Zayn’s lower lip between his own. “Shower.”

Zayn nodded in agreement, letting his hand slide from Liam’s neck, across his shoulder and down his arm before dropping away.

*

Liam’s bathroom tile was pale pink, the color of bubblegum, the floor and the walls alike. It took all of Zayn’s willpower not to laugh at the row of accent tiles inside the shower, the ones with actual pink roses on them, and the plexiglass door, yellowed with age, that rattled on its hinges after he and Liam stepped inside.

“I know precisely what you’re thinking,” Liam said, grinning ruefully. “And I agree entirely, alright?”

“It’s like your house is a time machine, it’s wicked.”

“Maybe it is,” Liam said, crowding closer, sliding his arms around Zayn’s middle, and sharing the warm stream of the water. “Maybe you woke up on the beach in—” Liam wrinkled his nose as he paused, thoughtful. “Nineteen seventy two.”

“Pretty sure your story falls apart when we get to the bit with the mobile phones and such.”

Liam sighed. “Shit. You’re right.” 

They stayed in the shower until the hot water started to cool, trading languid kisses and lingering touches between the business of making themselves clean again. Zayn sat on Liam’s bed in a towel afterward as Liam stood at his wardrobe and picked out something clean to wear. Zayn’s gaze flickered to the haphazard pile of denim on the floor that constituted his jeans, the only article of his clothing currently in the room.

“So, like,” Zayn said, hesitant, standing up to step over and retrieve his jeans, “I should go home now maybe, I guess.”

Liam turned around quick, his mouth set in a frown, holding a pair of shorts in his hand. “What for?”

Zayn shrugged, scratching the underside of his chin, his stubble already springing up thick. “Well. I haven’t got any clothes, for one.”

“Oh—do you need some? Here, wear something of mine, I don’t mind,” Liam said, turning around again to sift through his clothing drawers.

“Are you sure?”

Liam looked back at him again. “It’s not a problem at all, I mean. Unless—you know. If you want to go, I can also take you home.” Liam sifted again through his drawers, turning around with a neatly folded pile of items, holding them out for Zayn. “It’s up to you.”

“If you’re sure it’s cool?”

Liam nodded, taking a step closer, handing Zayn the clothes. “I’m sure.”

“I mean—staying,” Zayn clarified, looking through the boxers, black t-shirt and grey jogging bottoms Liam had handed him.

“Yeah, of course,” Liam said easily, returning to putting his own clothes on, pushing his arms into his t-shirt and stretching it over his head, balancing the collar briefly on his nose before tugging it down. “Someone has to help me with all that leftover barbecue.”

They had lunch on the patio, the sky clear and cloudless and the sun even warmer than it had been the day before. Then because Zayn had never even attempted to get into one before, Liam showed him how the hammock worked. They settled into it together and stayed in it for ages, swaying gently back and forth as the sun moved slowly overhead. Zayn dozed into an easy half-slumber, drifting in and out of consciousness, draped comfortably against Liam’s side.

When evening rolled in they started to watch a movie on Liam’s laptop, but got sidetracked in discussing a particular plot in the latest Batman comic series, which Liam then had to look for in his collection in the front room. In the back of his mind, Zayn kept thinking he shouldn’t stay again, that he should find his phone and ring for a car and go back to his house to deal with his life, whatever it looked like at that point, and whatever it would mean for him the next day. Then in the middle of both of them reading through an issue, Liam would bring up another question, a hypothetical one, like what did Zayn think would have happened if a particular villain had died forever, and how would it have changed the hero and what would have happened next, and then suddenly after speculating and plotting and inventing their own narrative, it was an hour later, and then another, and Zayn realized they were still sat on Liam’s floor in the front room, piles of comics strewn between them.

“What should we do now?” Liam asked, looking up hopefully as he closed his issue of Spiderman, his gaze soft.

Zayn shrugged a little. “Dunno.”

“We could finish the film, or... ” Liam trailed off, thoughtful. “Watch something different, maybe. I could put on some music? Or—I have a Playstation,” Liam turned his head suddenly, glancing at the television console behind him.

“You don’t have to, like, entertain me,” Zayn said quietly, tipping forward from where he was seated on the floor, slowly making his way closer to Liam on his hands and knees, careful to avoid traipsing directly over the stacks of scattered comics.

Liam raised his eyebrows as Zayn drew closer. “You sure you’re not—bored or anything?”

Zayn shook his head slowly, pinching his lower lip between his teeth. “Pretty sure, yeah.”

“Oh,” Liam said as Zayn crawled into his lap, rising up onto his knees to bracket Liam’s thighs, and then settling onto him. “Oh,” Liam said again, lower, his hands fitting to Zayn’s hips, fingers splayed on his lower back. “Well. If you’re sure.”

Zayn sat there for a moment, taking Liam in, the definition of his shoulders under Zayn’s touch, the warmth of his body where Zayn was sat against him, the firm grasp of Liam’s hands on his hips. Liam just gazed at him curiously, seemingly content just to sit there, still and quiet and close. Zayn’s fingers twitched against the fabric of Liam’s t-shirt and he tilted his head ever so slightly, bringing their lips closer, not quite touching.

“Your eyelashes are _so_ long,” Liam said, quiet with awe and affection.

Zayn’s eyes drifted shut against the warm rush of the unexpected compliment, biting back a grin as his cheeks grew warmer.

“They are,” Liam insisted, smiling, his thumbs pressing into Zayn’s hips, steady pressure. “Surely someone has mentioned this to you before.”

Zayn couldn’t immediately recall an instance where anyone had, but he also didn’t want to try very hard to conjure one up. 

“Yeah, but,” Zayn shifted a little, unable to keep from smiling right back at Liam’s face, “probably not right when I was trying to snog them, like.”

“Oh, did I interrupt?” Liam asked, his voice lilting with amusement. “So sorry. Please continue.”

Zayn narrowed his eyes, slowly ducking closer again, pausing as Liam drew back slightly.

“Do go on,” Liam said, playful, evading Zayn’s small advances, turning and tilting his head each time Zayn’s lips neared his own. “C’mon. Don’t let me stop you.”

Zayn sighed, a laugh bubbling its way out of his chest as their little game continued, until eventually he took Liam’s face in his hands, holding him firmly still while he kissed him, clumsy and off-center. Their light laughter stuttered between them as Liam tipped backward a bit, and then swayed upright again.

“You’re ridiculous,” Zayn murmured, just before Liam finally gave over and kissed him properly.

“You’re ridiculously fit,” Liam countered, and then kissed him again.

The same rush of warmth coursed through Zayn again, buzzing electric along his spine and spreading out, amplified in all the places Liam was touching him, hips and thighs and his mouth, over and over. Liam’s hands snuck under Zayn’s t-shirt, palming the bare skin at the base of his spine, and Zayn rolled his hips once, eliciting a groan from Liam.

“Thought of anything we could do yet?” Liam murmured, low and playful, his hands sneaking upward, all the way to Zayn’s shoulder blades.

“Maybe, yeah,” Zayn replied, his words slow and thick with longing.

“Go on then, tell me,” Liam said, capturing Zayn’s mouth in a kiss before he could answer. 

Zayn was too distracted to reply, lost in the way they fit together, in the taste of Liam’s mouth, Liam’s thighs flexing beneath him, and the unmistakable ridge of Liam’s cock through layers of soft cotton as Zayn rolled his hips over and over.

“Tell me,” Liam said again, his hands tucking smoothly into the back of the jogging bottoms Zayn was wearing, sliding between them and the boxers, squeezing at his bum, restricting his movement a little. “Tell me everything you want to do with me.”

“Everything?” Zayn managed, his voice catching as Liam’s fingers pressed along the seam between his cheeks.

“Or just one thing,” Liam amended with a grin. “Or anything, whatever you want, god—” Liam drew in a quick breath, kissing Zayn again, deep and urgent, his voice quiet and pleading. “Zayn.”

Zayn whined quietly, tugging at Liam’s lower lip with his teeth, the sound of his name in Liam’s reverent tone still unexpected, sending a deep shiver through him.

“Fuck me,” Zayn said finally, a breathy whisper against Liam’s mouth, their lips slick and sliding between heavy, harsh breaths. Zayn’s heart pounded relentlessly. “I want you to fuck me.”

Liam’s lips spread into a grin and he laughed lightly, short and breathy. Zayn’s heart stuttered with uncertainty and apprehension and he went still, his eyes blinking open.

“What?”

Liam’s eyes opened wide, searching Zayn’s face. “No—nothing, I just,” Liam’s gaze dropped to Zayn’s mouth and he wet his lips quickly with his tongue. “I was really hoping that’s what you’d say.”

Relief trickled over Zayn like water, loosening his expression and his nerves. “Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

“Good.”

“Should we take this to the bedroom, then?” Liam asked, slowly withdrawing his hands from the back of Zayn’s sweatpants.

“Probably best, yeah.”

They rose awkwardly from the floor, shuffling together and sharing kisses down the hallway and into Liam’s bedroom. The bedside light was still on, and Liam’s laptop sat abandoned at the end of the mattress. He quickly folded it shut and slid it under the bed and out of the way before sitting down, pulling Zayn into his lap again.

Liam lifted Zayn’s shirt off immediately, discarding it to the floor and folding his arms around him, pulling him flush to Liam’s body. 

“Could we leave the light on?” Liam asked, his eyes wide and hopeful, pressing a kiss to the side of Zayn’s chin. “I want to look at you.”

Zayn nodded shortly, slightly distracted with tugging at Liam’s shirt, pulling it up and over his head. Liam immediately kissed at Zayn’s clavicles, nuzzling against him, his hands stroking at Zayn’s back. Zayn folded his arms around Liam’s shoulders, keeping him close, and Liam embraced him in return, his arms flexing to hug Zayn tight.

By the time Zayn was on his back, naked with Liam kneeling between his thighs and slicking his fingers with lube, he belatedly wished he’d asked for the lights off. He was sure he was blushing, his face and neck flaring with the distinct warmth of self-consciousness. Liam didn’t seem to notice, his brow creased in concentration, his hands spreading Zayn’s thighs open to press between them, the dull nudge of his fingertips sliding back behind Zayn’s balls.

Zayn inhaled sharply, his skin prickling briefly at the sensation, the cool slickness of Liam’s touch only uncomfortable for a brief moment, giving over to the insistent pressure of Liam’s finger as it pushed against him. Zayn bit back a groan, another surge of warmth spreading over him as Liam’s finger slid inside him, sinking slowly.

“You okay?”

Zayn blinked quickly; he hadn’t realized he’d shut his eyes. He nodded short and small again. “Yeah,” he said quietly, a bit breathless.

Liam dropped his gaze, biting his lip, pressing his finger in further. By the time he added another, tipping forward and ducking his head to press his lips to Zayn’s chest, Zayn was breathing hard, tucking his hand into Liam’s hair, hauling him up for a proper kiss.

Liam pulled back, his eyes dark, his fingers sliding and scissoring, in and out to open Zayn up. Zayn shifted a little, pushing back against the press of Liam’s fingers, twisting up with a soft whimper. Liam put his other hand on Zayn’s shoulder, the heel of it pushing firmly against him, holding him still.

Zayn moaned, rocking his hips against the slide of Liam’s fingers, trying to spread his thighs even further, his knees bent and feet pushed firmly into the mattress.

“One more,” Liam said quietly, dropping his gaze, slowing his fingers to a stop. 

Zayn felt the slow increase of the stretch, the steady sharp spread as Liam added another finger, pressing in gradually. Zayn breathed heavily through it, staying still, unable to keep from whining and whimpering, Liam’s hand on his shoulder a steadying weight.

“You’re incredible,” Liam whispered reverently, and Zayn shuddered, his face and neck flaring with heat again.

Liam took his time, the slow drag and push of his fingers controlled and constant, the discomfort fading bit by bit until Zayn was breathing easier, rocking his hips again. Liam gazed down at him, his face half shadowed by the soft lamplight. He pressed his fingers in deep, nudging them in as far as possible, and held them there.

Zayn attempted to stifle a moan, the end of it spilling out as Liam curled his fingers slightly, slowly twisting them.

“Liam—” Zayn said, strained and pleading, grabbing on to Liam’s arm.

“Yeah?”

Zayn nodded, quick and desperate, almost panting, and Liam slowly drew his hand back, withdrawing his fingers.

Liam shifted, removing his hand from Zayn’s shoulder, reaching over to grab up the condom from the bedside table and sitting back on his heels to slip it on. Zayn shifted restlessly, reaching down to stroke himself as he watched Liam do the same, flashbacks of their morning handjobs causing him to smirk.

Liam looked up and grinned, then moved over him again quickly, the mattress dipping fast and jostling Zayn into light laughter as Liam settled on top of him, warm and solid and naked. Liam’s hand found its way into Zayn’s hair, curling tight as they kissed, Zayn’s chin tipping upward. He was held there by Liam’s weight, pinned securely to the bed, folding his legs around Liam’s hips.

“You good like this?” Liam asked between kisses, his voice low and breathless. “Or do you want—”

“Yeah, like this—” Zayn interjected, trying to shift, to get Liam moving.

Liam groaned, rolling his hips once, biting at Zayn’s lower lip before pulling back.

“C’mon,” Zayn encouraged, arching up restlessly as Liam moved into his hands and knees again. 

Liam quickly slicked himself up with more lube, taking hold of his cock, and leaned over Zayn again, carefully guiding himself into alignment. Zayn drew his knees up, his thighs stretched open, watching Liam’s hips sink toward his own, the blunt press of Liam’s cock pushing against him. Zayn held his breath as Liam inched inside, thick and slow, groaning low and quiet against the sharp, tight pressure. Liam kept his gaze pointed downward, cursing under his breath as Zayn’s body gave way, his hips stuttering to a halt as they met Zayn’s, the sharp points of Liam’s hipbones heavy against him.

Zayn exhaled hard and Liam looked up, gaze flickering over Zayn’s face, and then lowered himself even closer, leaning in for a rough kiss. Zayn whimpered into it, still trying to adjust to the feel of Liam inside him, impossibly broad and hard, filling him completely.

When Liam started to move, just barely shifting his hips, Zayn couldn’t help but to gasp, choking back another whimper, breathing fast. Liam went still again, waiting, quivering a little with the effort of it, his lips shaking when they met Zayn’s, tentative this time. Liam stroked the outside of Zayn’s thigh, slow sweeps of his hand, until Zayn’s breathing came easier.

“Okay?” Liam murmured, his face too close for Zayn to focus.

Zayn nodded, the end of his nose brushing the tip of Liam’s. Liam kissed him again, his eyes slowly closing, and tentatively tried once more to move.

It was still overwhelming, the full, heavy drag of Liam’s cock inside him, and Zayn’s heart raced hard, thudding uncomfortably in his chest. Liam moved slow, deliberately careful, easing out only partially and then sinking in again half as fast, shuddering with a shaky breath each time.

“Don’t stop,” Zayn said, barely a whisper, as the deep ache inside him slowly turned over, becoming less severe, gradually taken over by thin threads of pleasure.

Liam took ages to work up a rhythm, ages in which he kept himself pressed close, kissing Zayn intermittently, the heat and weight of his body anchoring Zayn in place, the flush of his skin turning to sweat.

Liam was flushed too, bright pink painted on his cheeks, the waves of his hair pulled tighter at his forehead, the dip between his collarbones glistening. He had one hand tucked beneath Zayn’s shoulder as he moved, the other holding the outside of Zayn’s thigh, and Zayn ran a hand down Liam’s back, sliding easily against his damp skin.

Liam shifted quickly, moving his hand from Zayn’s thigh and tucking it between them, seeking out the length of Zayn’s cock, folding his hand around it. Zayn moaned at the sudden contact, the intensity of Liam’s touch as he stroked him, Zayn’s breathing suddenly going shallow and faster as Liam’s hips regained their rhythm.

Zayn wanted to hold out, but the convergence of Liam’s hard, fast thrusts and the repeated collision of their hips and Liam’s hand stroking him was too much, his climax building rapidly. Liam kissed him again, thorough and urgent, and it was just distracting enough to hold him off another moment, his body trembling with tension. Liam sealed his lips to Zayn’s as Zayn made small, incoherent sounds of pleasure, over and over until he started to come, his mouth falling open, groaning long and loud. Liam pinned Zayn’s hips with his own, buried deep inside him, but stroked him through it as Zayn pulsed hard in his hand, coming in thick spurts up onto his own chest and over Liam’s fingers.

Liam moved his hand back to Zayn’s thigh, grabbing hard and resuming the fierce, quick thrusts of his hips just as Zayn was starting to catch his breath. Zayn gasped as Liam grunted and groaned and lost the cadence of his rhythm, snapping his hips hard against Zayn’s, pushing in deep and staying there as he came with a strangled moan.

Zayn huffed out a breath as Liam collapsed on top of him, bringing one arm around to drape it over Liam’s back, both of them too winded to speak.

*

Liam changed the sheets before they settled in for the night, and Zayn fit himself snugly against Liam’s side, his head resting on Liam’s chest. They talked quietly in the dark, sharing thoughts and anecdotes between long stretches of silence, neither of them quite willing to give in to sleep. In the quiet moments Zayn was lulled by the steady thud of Liam’s heart, and the whisper soft resonance of his breath as it slowly filled his lungs and then receded, in and out.

“Tell me something,” Liam said in a murmur, tenderly running his fingertips through Zayn’s hair.

“What sort of something?” Zayn replied, his words slow and lazy with fatigue.

“Something about you,” Liam said, his fingers going still for a moment, and then sliding into Zayn’s hair again. “Something I don’t already know.”

Zayn blinked, his heart stuttering once, jolted suddenly into wakefulness. This was his opportunity, a clear chance to put all of his cards on the table, full disclosure. He tried to imagine Liam reacting favorably, fully understanding Zayn’s motivations and reasoning, and winning his unconditional sympathy about it. But no matter how much he wanted to believe in the feasibility of that outcome, he knew it wouldn’t ever truly be possible, not now. If—or when—he ever told Liam the truth, the most he could allow himself to hope for was that Liam would refrain from selling the whole story to the papers, and maybe, eventually, he would forgive Zayn enough that they could become friends.

The thought of it made Zayn’s head hurt, sadness and regret an echoing throb at his temples, to match the insistent rush of his pulse in his ears. He stayed completely still in Liam’s arms, and decided he’d tell Liam in the morning, after they’d rested, and before Zayn had to leave.

Liam’s fingers stilled again. “Are you sleeping?” he whispered.

Zayn closed his eyes slowly and said nothing.

*

When Zayn woke the next morning it was late and quiet; the sun was bright behind Liam’s draperies and the ceiling fan above the bed spun soundlessly. There was a distant, muted _thunk_ from the direction of the kitchen, which Zayn recognized as the glass patio door sliding shut. He listened intently to the sound of Liam’s footsteps growing closer, low and soft on the tile through the hall. Liam came into the room, moving quietly, his back to Zayn as he unzipped his wetsuit and began to peel it off, stepping out of it. He was covered in seawater, his hair curled up and dripping, his bare skin glistening with it.

Liam turned around, fully undressed, and climbed onto the bed, making his way from the end up over Zayn’s sleep-laden body. Zayn inhaled deeply, starting to stretch, and Liam pulled the sheets away to press himself against Zayn, skin to skin.

Zayn made an _mmph_ sound as Liam started to kiss him, his sun-warmed body settling heavily over Zayn’s. His tongue slid into Zayn’s mouth, opening him up easily; Zayn inhaled a slow, deep breath through his nose, still shaking off the remnants of sleep. Liam’s mouth was warm, his lips tinged with salt, his sea-soaked kisses growing increasingly insistent as they coaxed Zayn from his slumber. Liam moved against him, slipping a little from the residual sheen of water, his cock hard and full against Zayn’s hip.

Zayn exhaled in a rush as Liam’s kisses trailed to his neck, tipping his head back into the pillow, writhing a little under Liam’s weight. Liam licked and nipped at Zayn’s skin, down his shoulder and at his collarbone, sucking lightly at the base of his throat. He lifted up just a bit, the mattress dipping slightly as he created some space between them, still keeping his head bent to drop wet presses of his mouth to Zayn’s skin, licking a trail up toward his ear.

“Turn over,” Liam said, low and quiet, his hand already curling at Zayn’s hip, urging him to turn.

Zayn peered up at Liam as he started to shift, twisting his lower body over before his shoulders followed, settling on his belly against the sheets, folding his arms under the pillow. Liam draped himself against Zayn’s back with a low groan, settling his full weight firm and solid onto Zayn’s body.

“Couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Liam said, right into Zayn’s ear again, nipping at Zayn’s neck.

Zayn whined in response, quiet and needy, lifting his hips against Liam’s weight, his arse pushing upward. Liam was hard, his cock already resting in the cleft of Zayn’s cheeks, and he rocked against him a couple of times, breathing out hard against the back of Zayn’s neck.

“Yeah, Liam,” Zayn said, his voice thick and rough from sleep.

“Kept—remembering how fucking tight you are,” Liam said, his hand trailing down Zayn’s side, shoulder to hip, settling around his hipbone and grabbing hard.

Zayn kept rolling his hips, making little needy sounds, his cock rubbing against the sheets. Liam sucked at his shoulder and the side of his neck, his fingers gripping hard at Zayn’s hip, drops of saltwater from Liam’s hair snaking their way against Zayn’s skin.

Liam managed to grab up the lube by only barely shifting his weight, keeping his chest flush to Zayn’s back. He lifted up just long enough to squeeze some into his hand, coating his fingers, then reached down and dragged two of them hastily between Zayn’s cheeks, slicking him up from his balls to his tailbone. Zayn inhaled sharply at the cool wetness and the sudden sensation, but pushed back against the press of Liam’s thumb with a deep groan.

Zayn breathed hard, moaning as Liam pushed the tip of his thumb inside him, his face pillowed on his forearms, turned to one side. Liam worked him open quickly, replacing his thumb with two fingers, and Zayn could still feel the insistent press of Liam’s cock against his thigh. Liam’s long fingers turned and twisted, careful and steady, moving constantly, pushing in and drawing back out, the slickness of them audible in the otherwise quiet room. He stretched and pressed at Zayn’s hole, slipping in a third finger, pumping them in and out as Zayn writhed, pushing back.

Zayn whimpered unhappily as Liam’s fingers suddenly withdrew, and Liam shifted back, breaking all contact. Zayn looked back over his shoulder, watching as Liam tore open a condom, rolling it on, slicking himself up with more lube. Zayn closed his eyes when Liam lowered himself, pressing fully against Zayn’s body again, Liam’s cock slipping into place against Zayn’s bum. Liam took hold of Zayn’s hip again, rolling against him, shifting his hips around as he breathed hard against the back of Zayn’s neck, until the tip of his cock nudged at Zayn’s hole and began to press inward.

They groaned in unison, Zayn’s body yielding as Liam slid into him, stuttering pressure until his hips were flush to Zayn’s. Liam pressed his mouth to the back of Zayn’s neck, staying still for a few heavy breaths, shuddering as he started to move. Zayn curled his hands into fists, the stretch of Liam’s cock and Liam’s weight pinning him in place, Liam’s forehead dropping to his shoulder as he worked up a slow, lazy rhythm, the sharp points of his hips nudging against Zayn’s arse.

Liam kept kissing him, wet presses of his mouth to Zayn’s shoulders and back, whimpering and groaning as he moved inside him, drawing sharp gasps and low whines out of Zayn. Liam hauled his hips up a little further, getting a hand under him, giving Zayn his fist to thrust into.

Zayn moaned, his face still half-pressed to the mattress, Liam’s body still heavy over him, impeding his movement. He managed to work out the rhythm of Liam’s hips, pushing back against him, and forward into the curl of Liam’s hand. 

“Zayn,” Liam said, low and insistent. “You’re incredible, Zayn.”

Zayn reached back with one hand, tucking his fingers into the damp curls of Liam’s hair, holding on. Liam moved faster, urged on by the rocking of Zayn’s hips, the entire bed shifting.

“Fuck—” Liam said, short and strained, his hips stuttering and losing their rhythm.

Zayn curled his fist tight in Liam’s hair, pushing back hard against Liam’s thrusts, listening as Liam’s breathing grew short and shallow and then dissolved into a long moan. Liam went still, his cock pulsing inside Zayn as he came.

Liam shuddered and groaned, and Zayn didn’t dare move, not even a fraction. Liam’s hand around him suddenly started to move again, squeezing and stroking, fast and insistent. Zayn shuddered and trembled with the effort of staying still, wanting to keep Liam inside him until he could come, breathing deep and hard as Liam touched him.

“C’mon, Zayn,” Liam murmured into Zayn’s shoulder, then closed his teeth against Zayn’s skin, light and tentative and warm and wet.

The pinch of Liam’s bite was enough to send him over, his cock spilling over Liam’s fingers as he came quietly, turning his face into the sheets as Liam groaned in satisfaction against his skin.

*

It took two and a half hours for Brooke to set out all of her demands, once she finally finished chiding Zayn for his _irresponsible, ungrateful, unprofessional, self-sabotaging_ choices. Zayn was glad he was able to ignore the majority of the lecture; his gaze fixed at a point on the wall behind her, his mind on a constant loop of newly minted Liam-memories.

He’d gone home, finally, reluctantly, his house in the hills feeling more foreign than ever after Liam had dropped him off. He was still wearing Liam’s clothes and his fridge was full of Liam’s cooking and in the pocket of his coat, Zayn had found the wilted, withered daisy that had sat behind Liam’s ear the first time they kissed. Zayn had carefully pressed it between the pages of a comic book that Liam had loaned him, setting a heavy hardback art book on top of it.

Brooke slid a stapled stack of paper across the table to him, and he finally shifted his attention to her.

“This is your schedule for the following two weeks. You’ll see it starts with this meeting we’re having now. Since you couldn’t manage to turn up on time and we’re running late, I suggest you hurry up and get ready for dinner.”

Zayn frowned at the page. _Seven thirty, dinner at Spago, potential book publisher._

“I’m not hungry.”

“Good,” Brooke snipped. “That simplifies my expense report. You still have to go, so go home and get yourself together, Zack.”

Zayn flipped from one page to the next, scanning over his meetings, appearances, appointments and social functions. He had a half a day open here or there, but they were random and rare. He sighed, running a hand over his face.

“I’ll have Amber import everything into your calendar, and call you a cab.”

*

Scheduling time to see Liam became an exercise in futility and deception; he feigned headaches and stomach flu to postpone his more banal obligations like meeting with his stylists. He turned up at other functions only long enough to have his photo taken before skipping out early, and if he planned his dodging cleverly, he’d have as long as twenty-four consecutive hours to hide out at Liam’s house. Sometimes he’d get caught though, waking up to voicemails where Brooke was shouting down the phone at him, and sometimes he’d do everything he was supposed to, and still be kept late, or get caught in traffic, or shuffled off to another place with no way to object.

Liam, for the most part, never seemed to get too upset with all of Zayn’s last-minute changes. Zayn only ever left him reluctantly, lingering in long kisses while his car waited in Liam’s driveway. He evaded Liam’s infrequent inquiries about his schedule with non-committal answers, generic declarations of errands that he needed to sort out, or his standard vague excuse for being busy—networking. It was clear that Liam didn’t quite feel comfortable enough to pry, and Zayn was always ready with the specifics of when he’d return, keeping to his promises of calls and texts in the interim.

For all of his evasiveness in order to keep his work separate, Zayn found himself quickly entangled with Liam in every other way, the bungalow and the beach becoming his sanctuary. Zayn quickly grew accustomed to and enamored with the fine coarseness of stray sand between Liam’s sheets, the sweet hint of Liam’s almond-flavored lip balm, and the palpable feeling of his walls dismantling.

Zayn learned how Liam liked near-constant touching that bordered on roughness; the light drag of Zayn’s nails on his back, the pinch of Zayn’s teeth on his nipples, the harsh scratch of Zayn’s fingers through his pubic hair. Zayn liked the security of Liam’s hold, the firm fit of his hand around the back of Zayn’s neck, the broad span of his shoulders when Zayn was folded in half under him, legs stretched taut, and the solid spread of Liam’s fingers between his shoulder blades as he pinned Zayn to the bed. They fucked on the floor, against the wall, inside the shower; Liam bent him over the end of the sofa, the kitchen table, and the edge of the bathroom counter so their eyes could meet in the mirror. Zayn liked the small hours of the night, waking after a short sleep, going down on Liam after gently coaxing him to consciousness. Liam preferred mornings, spooning Zayn from behind, Zayn’s face turned up for an over-the-shoulder kiss as Liam rolled his hips, pushing in deep. Bruises began to appear on Zayn’s body, little remnants and reminders of their voraciousness, small rounded shapes in dusty blues along his hipbones, on his thighs, and in the delicate skin on the underside of his wrists.

Trying to work out a way, in his head, to explain the entire truth to Liam kept him awake at night. He would slip out of Liam’s bed and slip into Liam’s robe on his way to the kitchen, bare feet treading silently on the tile floor, and then carefully ease the back door open to step out onto the concrete patio. As he pulled slow drags on his cigarette, the end of it flaring an angry orange and then fading to dull dark ash, Zayn would look out toward the water and try to imagine a reaction from Liam that contained anything other than resentment. Zayn bargained with himself silently—tomorrow, two days from now, before the end of the week—deadlines that came and went, over and over again. In the distance the ocean drifted in and then receded, hushed and constant against the shore.

“You look like a proper rock star or something,” Liam said to him once over breakfast, an innocuous comment undoubtedly attributed to Zayn’s aviators and the cigarette perched in his fingers.

Zayn went very still, and Liam continued to grin at him, raising an eyebrow, scraping butter onto his toast.

“Look out. I think I might properly fancy you.”

Zayn had put out his cigarette and climbed awkwardly into Liam’s lap, hugging him tightly, sending the butter knife clattering to the concrete and nearly tipping them both over onto the patio.

During what was meant to be a routine and brief check-in meeting, Zayn learned that the label suddenly wanted two more days of recording out of him. The pervasive debate about and dissatisfaction with his new album had culminated in another three tracks being scrapped without his input, and the label wanted them replaced immediately. Zayn attempted to argue for postponing the studio time but his manager, as usual, wouldn’t hear a word of it; she was annoyed enough with having to push his promotional photo shoot to the weekend, when the photographer they wanted was meant to be leaving the country. He sat and listened to them—Brooke, the suits from the label, his producer—argue in circles, talking over one another, placing phone calls in the middle of negotiating his time like he was a rental property. All he could bring himself to care about was how all of it would prevent him from seeing Liam again for at least three more days, and how his half-formed explanations were swiftly wearing thin.

“Where are you going?” Brooke asked sharply as Zayn stood up.

“The toilet,” Zayn replied, matching her derision. “Fuck’s sake.”

“Sorry,” Brooke said immediately, admonished, reaching out as Zayn walked past, touching his arm briefly in apology. He shrugged her off and left the room, making his way down the corridor to Amber’s desk.

“Sup?” Amber said by way of greeting, looking up from her computer.

“You busy or anything?” Zayn asked quietly.

Amber shrugged, and the phone on her desk lit up, trilling sharply. She glanced over and pushed a button, silencing it.

“Not really. What’s going on?”

Zayn hesitated a moment, and then sank into one of the chairs that faced the desk, slouching a little. Amber tilted her head at him curiously.

“Have you ever, like,” Zayn began, “known someone for awhile and then found out something about them that they sort of, like, didn’t tell you to begin with?”

“Hang on, pause,” Amber said. “Business or non-business?”

Zayn frowned in confusion. “Eh?”

“Are we talking? Or, like,” Amber leaned in closer, lowering her voice. “Talking.”

“Whichever one we can pretend didn’t happen when your boss comes back.”

“Got it, okay,” Amber said. “So you found out something about someone? What level are we working with, here? I mean—‘has a parole officer’ level, or ‘wears the same pair of socks for a week’ level?”

Zayn huffed out a short laugh, amused.

“I have experience with both,” Amber added dryly.

“It’s kind of—” Zayn paused. “It’s different than that, I guess.”

Amber narrowed her eyes, thinking. “What bugs you more, though? The thing—whatever it is you know that you didn’t before—or being kept out of the loop about it?”

Zayn bit his lower lip briefly.

“Cos sometimes there are good reasons, you know?” Amber shrugged. “Like, really good reasons to not tell someone something. Until there’s a good reason that you should.”

Zayn nodded, his thoughts churning. “Yeah.”

“And then sometimes you just have to walk away, because the same pair of socks for a week is fucking disgusting, and there’s absolutely no excuse for it.”

Zayn grinned again, his unsettledness subsiding. “I see what you mean, yeah.”

He would absolutely—no excuses—talk with Liam when he saw him next, and explain everything, and hope that Liam would see his reasons.

*

The studio days that followed were long and stressful; everyone involved had been pulled away from other projects, and the energy was contentious. Zayn couldn’t see any greater merit in the songs he was being made to record in this round compared to the completed ones the label had scrapped; the arbitrary preference for one mediocre pop song over another was completely lost on him. He stood in the vocal booth and sang the same lines over and over, endlessly making minor alterations to his performance as instructed by the producers and the engineers and the label rep who refused to leave.

He scarcely had a chance to reply to Liam’s texts, answering them in batches when he had short breaks, apologizing for being late with his replies. He told Liam he was busy with a project but didn’t want to jinx it by giving too much away, and promised he’d explain everything when they saw each other again.

On his second day in the studio, Zayn brought in his laptop, pulled his producer aside, and showed him the tracks he’d been working on over the past month. 

“I was thinking, like—since we’re switching out some of the songs anyway, we could use one of these maybe,” Zayn said.

“For this album?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean—don’t get me wrong, dude, there’s some good stuff here I’m sure, but.”

“But what?”

“But we need every minute of time in this studio to finish up with what we’ve got today.”

“It’s my album,” Zayn tried, his voice sounding ineffective even to his own ears. “Shouldn’t at least one song actually be mine?”

“You’re gonna have to take that up with your manager, man, I’m sorry.” Zayn watched as he stood up, starting to walk away. “Next time though, maybe.”

Zayn closed his laptop slowly, the playback of his dance track abruptly cutting out.

It was after three in the morning by the time Zayn was finished in the studio, the session running more than six hours longer than planned. His alarm woke him at eight for the car arriving at half past to take him to the rescheduled photo shoot. He sat through hair and makeup repeatedly stifling his yawning, sipping constantly at a cup of coffee, anxious with the knowledge that if he made it through the day he’d get to see Liam and finally tell him everything. There were test shots and lighting measurements and dressing and undressing only to change again, his stylist’s team picking through racks of clothing for hours on end. Zayn stayed quiet; his voice was rough, battered from two nonstop days in the vocal booth. It was well into the afternoon before the actual photographer arrived, his team buzzing into action at his delivered orders. He gave Zayn a cursory handshake, addressed him as Zack, and began to explain his vision for what he hoped to accomplish.

“Just tell me where to stand,” Zayn said, impatiently interrupting the lengthy narration.

The photographer was annoyed, Zayn could tell, and proceeded to send his instructions through one of his assistants instead of speaking directly to Zayn. After the better part of an hour, the photographer called a ten-minute break.

Zayn was ushered off to the make-up chair again, and while more concealer was applied to the dark shadows under his eyes, Brooke appeared, walking up with a file folder in her arm.

“Just thought I’d stop by, see how it’s going,” Brooke said, and then frowned. “You look wrecked.”

“Cheers, so kind of you.”

Brooke paused before continuing. “Anyway. Now that recording is done, we’ve drawn up your preliminary promo schedule for the next six weeks. I e-mailed it to you but you never read my e-mails, so I printed you a copy to look over.”

She handed him the file folder and he set it on his lap, unopened.

“Don’t you want to take a look?”

“Does it really matter?” Zayn challenged. “Go here, do this, go there, do that. It could say anything. It’s not like my views on it have any bearing.”

“Fine,” Brooke said tersely. “When you get around to reading it, call me. But get some sleep first,” she said as she turned to go, her heels clicking on the floor. “Cranky is not a good look for you.”

It was another two and a half hours before Zayn’s car finally dropped him at Liam’s bungalow, and the sun had already dipped below the horizon. When he stepped inside and Liam hugged him with a cheerful hello, Zayn folded both of his arms all the way around Liam’s middle, holding on tight, and resting his chin over Liam’s shoulder. Liam returned the embrace with equal enthusiasm, squeezing Zayn just a little tighter when Zayn didn’t let go.

“I’ve missed you,” Liam said, quiet and earnest. “I thought you would arrive a bit earlier—have you eaten already?”

Zayn shook his head, finally drawing back. “No.”

“Neither have I. Let’s go somewhere, yeah? My treat—anything you’d like.” Liam pulled his car keys from his pocket, all ready to go.

Zayn’s heart dropped. It was Saturday night at seven o’clock—no matter where they went, there would be crowds of people.

“Couldn’t we just order something in?” Zayn asked, treading carefully. “I’m kind of knackered.”

“Let me take you out, yeah?” Liam replied, a bit wistful, his hand returning briefly to the dip of Zayn’s waist, his brow furrowing. “I need to go out anyhow, I haven’t got any milk or bread or anything useful left here.”

Zayn couldn’t come up with an adequate argument. “Yeah, alright,” he said finally, resigned. “Let’s go.”

Liam leaned in, pressing a swift kiss to Zayn’s temple, and led the way out the door.

In the car Zayn tried to think of someplace to suggest that wouldn’t be too busy or conspicuous; nothing trendy or popular, something out of the way where he might possibly appear and retreat unnoticed. He didn’t have extensive knowledge, however, of where to go to avoid being seen, having spent the better part of a year instructed to do the opposite. When Liam suggested a café that Zayn hadn’t heard of, Zayn quickly looked it up on his phone and decided it might be alright—it was outside of Hollywood and not too upscale, but sophisticated enough that he’d be unlikely to run across too many of his fans. He agreed and Liam seemed happier and Zayn relaxed just a fraction.

There was a valet service and the steadying press of Liam’s hand on the small of his back as they walked through the door, and Zayn looked around quickly as Liam spoke with the hostess, anxious to assess the likelihood of going unnoticed. The café was charming, quiet and shadowed, the soft filter of candlelight dotting the dozens of dark wood tables. Liam’s hand was still at his back as the hostess began to lead them through to one of the empty tables in the middle, and Zayn sat down quickly, still brimming with uneasiness. The hostess was explaining the specials, but Zayn’s eyes couldn’t stop moving, darting from one person to the next in the crowded dining room, checking and double-checking that no one was watching. Under the table, his knee was bouncing rapidly.

It was miserable and Zayn hated it, hated that he couldn’t even go out to dinner, that he had to be constantly vigilant of stares and whispers and unsubtle attempts at being photographed. Mostly he hated that he’d waited this long to explain everything, that he’d deliberately passed on every previous opportunity. He took a slow, deep breath and attempted to settle himself; comforted marginally by the fact that no one seemed to be paying them even the slightest bit of attention.

“Should we get some wine?” Liam said, leaning a little closer to share the wine menu between them. “You should choose, probably, I’m no good with this.”

Liam’s hand brushed his own where Zayn was resting it on the table, a tentative touch and then a more deliberate one, Liam’s fingertips tracing the bumps of Zayn’s knuckles, back and forth in a slow, sweeping motion. Zayn’s immediate instinct was to withdraw, to tuck his hands away so they wouldn’t be seen, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. Liam didn’t even seem to realize he was doing it, his gaze fixed on the menu in contemplation. For a moment Zayn indulged in the fantasy that he had nothing to worry about except choosing a wine, perfectly content to be out on a lovely Saturday night date. He slowly turned his hand over beneath Liam’s, returning the tender touches.

“What do you think?” Liam said, his gaze lifting to meet Zayn’s. 

Zayn nodded, short and quick. “Yeah, we should.”

When the server arrived, there was a moment in which he stumbled over his scripted greeting as he met Zayn’s gaze, and Zayn’s heart seized up uncomfortably, waiting for the inevitable question or comment. The server recovered quickly though, and if there was some element of recognition, he didn’t mention it once. Liam made some inquiries about the menu and the server made some recommendations and they ordered their meals and a bottle of wine, and Zayn slowly began to relax again.

Liam excused himself to the restroom just after the wine arrived, promising to expect an explanation of Zayn’s mysterious project upon his return. Zayn checked his phone, clearing out his message notifications, none of them appearing to be urgent. He was tucking it back into his pocket when he looked up, watching a man and a teenage girl approach him carefully. She had long dark hair and an expression of astonishment, while the middle-aged man behind her, obviously her father, looked on hopefully.

_Oh no_ , Zayn thought. _No, no, not right now_.

He looked away and briefly considered pretending to take a call, but he’d just put his phone away. He glanced toward the direction of the restrooms; Liam was nowhere in sight.

“Hi, Zack?” the girl said quietly as she lingered nearby, the man behind her placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to bother you,” she said quickly, her voice thin and shaky. “But it’s my birthday and I really like you. Could I maybe get a picture?”

Zayn’s heart pounded wildly, his gaze flickering between the girl, her dad, and the opposite end of the restaurant.

“Sure, yeah,” Zayn said, standing up from his chair. “Just real quick though, okay? What’s your name?”

“Oh my god,” the girl said as Zayn put his arm around her, and her father fumbled with his phone. “Oh my god, um.” She was shaking visibly, her shoulders trembling.

“It’s cool babe, just breathe, yeah? How old are you today?”

“Fifteen,” she said, then giggled nervously, bringing her hand to her mouth to stifle it.

“Come on Sarah, sweetheart, smile,” her dad encouraged.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Sarah said, taking another shaky breath, and her father finally snapped a photo, then another, the flash exploding repeatedly in the dimness of the room.

“Happy birthday, Sarah,” Zayn said, indulging her briefly when she went in for a hug.

“Oh my god, thank you, thank you so much Zack, I love you.”

“Thanks, man,” her father added, extending his hand. Zayn shook it briefly and then pulled his chair out again.

“Have a nice night,” Zayn said politely as he sat back down, watching Sarah and her dad walk away, knowing that the photo would be hitting the internet in a matter of minutes.

As the waiter walked by, Zayn swiftly got his attention.

“Terribly sorry,” Zayn said, pulling his wallet out. “But I’m going to need everything to go, please, as soon as possible.”

“Sure thing,” the waiter replied, and Zayn handed him several large bills, more than enough to cover the check.

Liam caught the exchange between Zayn and the waiter from several tables away, returning with a confused expression.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m not feeling so great, actually,” Zayn said, briefly touching his hand to his stomach. “Can we just get out of here?”

Liam studied him, a bewildered expression on his face. “Um. Yeah, alright, I guess so, if you need to.”

“Sorry, I just. I need to go.”

Liam frowned at the table, the untouched glasses of wine, and the nearly full bottle. “Alright.”

Zayn waited for the carryout bag with their dinners while Liam stepped out to get the car from the valet. He was suddenly arrested with nerves all over again; anxious that more people would turn up to ask for photos, that they’d already be waiting outside, that he’d have no explanation for Liam about any of it. He should have insisted on staying in. He lingered near the door in the back, the one that the servers used going back and forth to the kitchen, staying out of sight of the main room. It was still a fixable evening, Zayn tried to tell himself. He had rows of wine at home. He would explain everything to Liam and all of his strange behavior would suddenly make sense. He could even show Liam his artwork; let him hear the songs he’d been writing. 

After at least another ten minutes, the server finally appeared with a handled paper bag, surprised to find Zayn waiting so close to the kitchen doors.

“Here you are, and—oh, your change, sir,” he said, starting to sift through the pocket of his apron.

“Nah, just keep it,” Zayn said. “Cheers.”

“Oh—thanks. Thank you very much, Mr. Miller.”

Zayn frowned and quickly turned away, hurrying out to the front. Liam was already waiting in the car.

“Are you alright? Should we stop somewhere for something?” Liam asked, his brow furrowed tightly in concern.

“No, let’s just—let’s go to mine, yeah? S’closer.” Zayn slid his sunglasses on.

“You didn’t mention feeling unwell,” Liam said sadly, turning onto the main road. “Sorry if I was too insistent about going out.”

“No, please don’t be,” Zayn said, guilt and anxiety beginning to give him an actual stomachache. “It’s not your fault.”

Liam stayed quiet, and Zayn spent the rest of the drive thinking about how he’d reveal everything to Liam as soon as they were settled.

“Doing alright?” Liam asked, navigating the final sloping curve on the road to Zayn’s house. They were nearly there, and he had finally begun to relax.

“Yeah,” Zayn replied, nodding a little. “I just—”

His words halted abruptly as his driveway came into view and Liam began to slow for the approach. A half a dozen cars lined both sides of the road, bracketing the entrance to his driveway, and at least seven or eight men were stood there, each of them carrying a large camera, waiting and ready.

“Shit. Fuck. Shit.” Zayn sunk lower in his seat, panic arresting him all over again.

“What’s all this, then?” Liam said as he made the turn into the drive.

The flashes began, exploding like continual strobe-light fireworks, the shouting following in a mad crescendo. Liam pulled to a stop at the closed gate, a little abrupt in his confusion.

“What on earth going on?” Liam exclaimed, dumbfounded and distressed, shielding his eyes from the endless pops of bright light.

Zayn had to get out to put in the key code to open the gate, and as soon as he stepped from the car there was a terrorizing replicated chorus of “ _Zack!_ ” and a barrage of shouted questions, bookended by the repetition of the name that wasn’t his. 

_Where’ve you been, Zack!_

_Zack, who’s your friend!_

_Come on, Zack! Smile!_

Zayn stayed silent, his fingers trembling as he pushed the code into the keypad and the gate rumbled to life, rolling slowly aside. He got back into Liam’s car and shut the door again, the jeering reduced to a muffled din, his heart roaring in his ears.

“Jesus—what the hell!” Liam pulled through the gate, still squinting and blinking, stopping quickly again at the top of the drive, causing Zayn to reach out and catch himself with his hand on the dashboard. Liam killed the engine instantly.

“No seriously—what _was_ that?” Liam asked, alarmed. “And why did they—who the fuck is Zack?”

Zayn winced at the way Liam said it, disdainful and scoffing with derision.

“Let’s just—go inside, okay? And I’ll explain,” Zayn managed, his voice steady despite the way his heart sank, deep into the pit of his stomach.

Liam followed him to the door in silence, the cameras beyond the gate still whirring and clicking nonstop beneath the cacophony of shouting. Zayn could barely get his key into the lock, trembling as he desperately attempted to come up with an explanation in his head that was forgivable, some way to make Liam understand, and to justify to him why Zayn had done what he did for so long. His mind was unhelpfully vacant of ideas, as cold and empty as his foyer, beyond which Liam refused to move.

“What’s going on, Zayn?” Liam asked, his tone guarded, his forehead creased in concern. He tucked his hands into his pockets, and stared intently, expectantly at him.

“This is, erm,” Zayn hesitated, his voice quivering, the echoes of the shouting photographers playing over in his mind. “I don’t know how to...” he trailed off again, his throat closing up in anguish.

“Are you actually called Zack? Is that what you don’t know how to say?”

Zayn shook his head fiercely. “No. No, I’m not—I’m—”

“Then why did all of those people out there call you that?”

“Listen, please,” Zayn said. “I’m not called Zack, I swear to you—please, just come inside, I’ll explain all of it, okay?”

“Why did they want to take so many photographs of you?”

Zayn swallowed hard, his sense of rationality slipping. “They only think I’m called Zack, okay? But they don’t—”

“But why would they think that?” Liam said, impatient, insistent in a way Zayn had never heard before.

“Because they don’t know me!” Zayn shouted, his voice echoing in the height of his ceilings.

Liam stayed quiet, stunned, and Zayn continued.

“They—” Zayn said, gesturing sharply with one hand, his frustration and contempt boiling over, “only know a stupid, insipid pop star, by his fake name, and his—” Zayn clenched his jaw for a split second, bitterly. “Fake _fucking_ career, and his phony life and they have no idea— _no_ idea what the truth is.”

Liam frowned, looking more confused than ever, but still held Zayn’s gaze. “What is the truth, then?” he asked, the sharpness and indignation gone from his tone.

Zayn swallowed hard again, his throat closing up. “Please come inside, okay? I’ll explain everything.”

*

They sat on Zayn’s sofa for the better part of two hours, with Zayn attempting to convey to Liam the circumstances under which he’d found himself waking up on the beach behind Liam’s house more than a month before. Talking about Zack Miller was, Zayn realized, almost like talking about someone from a book or a film; he’d spent so much time attempting to extrapolate himself from his public persona that it had become easy to refer to Zack as someone else entirely. Liam asked question on top of question, wanting answers and explanations where Zayn didn’t always have them, worrying at his lip in distress.

“I should have told you ages ago, I know that,” Zayn said, his head pounding relentlessly with exhaustion.

“I very much wish you would have,” Liam responded sadly, holding his own head in his hands, sitting forward on the sofa, his elbows resting on his knees, his gaze fixed on the carpet. “Did you think I’d just—not want to talk to you anymore, or—what?”

“No,” Zayn said. “I didn’t think that.” 

It would be impossible to make Liam understand exactly how lecherous and opportunistic people could be, to explain to him how, out of the hundreds and hundreds of people Zayn had met and interacted with, the ones who didn’t want something from him could be counted on one hand. 

“So what happens now?” Zayn asked, after Liam said nothing for a long moment.

“I don’t know, Zayn.”

Liam sounded lost; he still wouldn’t meet Zayn’s gaze. Zayn felt the inevitable vice grip of dread, his chest slowly constricting.

“Liam,” Zayn said quietly, pleading.

Liam looked over, but dropped his gaze again quickly. “I think—I need a bit of time to wrap my head around this. If I can.”

“I’m sorry,” Zayn said.

“I know,” Liam said, hesitating for a moment, and then standing up. “I just—give me a day or so, alright?”

Zayn nodded, rising from the sofa as well. “Sure, yeah.”

“I’m not—” Liam paused, rubbing at his forehead, searching for words. “I just need to think about this. On my own for awhile.”

Zayn nodded. “Alright.”

Liam was quiet for another moment, the tension between them heavy and uncomfortable. “Are the idiots with the cameras going to harass me again when I leave?”

Zayn wanted to make a glib comment— _try dealing with that question every day_ —but held his tongue. “I’m sure they’re gone by now.”

“Right. I’ll call you,” Liam said, meeting his gaze for only a split second again.

Zayn watched as Liam walked away, his steps echoing in the otherwise still room, unable to overcome the inherent finality of it, the apprehension that Liam was leaving for good.

*

Zayn still hadn’t eaten or slept but he couldn’t stand to just sit alone in his house, not with the thin threads of his life unraveling around him. He threw on a sweatshirt and a beanie and a pair of trainers and set out into the night, with no purpose or destination in mind. Aside from his hunger and tiredness, his mind was clear; when he reached the road at the end of his driveway he began to walk, ascending further and further into the hills on foot.

The roads were not made for pedestrians, but Zayn pushed onward anyhow, keeping to the side of the pavement as he went. He’d had little opportunity or reason to explore beyond his own property, and quickly discovered the steep grades and sharp curves made his footing a bit tricky between the rushes of passing headlights. He climbed and climbed for the better part of an hour, until the driveways grew fewer and further between, the intervals between passing cars lengthening to long quiet minutes. The sky was overcast and the air was mostly still.

On a quiet curve, Zayn scaled the safety railing, stepping right over onto a flat stone ledge, tufts of grass poking up out of the cracks in the ground. The ledge itself was several feet wide, beyond which the ground dropped away steeply, rocks and bushes and trees giving way to the slanted rooftops in the near distance, the muted yellows of house lights, and the intermittent turquoise dots of illuminated swimming pools. Beyond the hills, the vast city stretched out toward the horizon like a quilt of golden light, the clustered columns of the downtown skyscrapers in the distance.

Zayn sat cross-legged on the ledge, gazing out over the view for a long time, letting the patchwork of lights blur together as his focus softened. He thought about Zack Miller, about the impending circus that the album release would bring, and the promo schedule he hadn’t even looked at yet. He thought about the tours he’d done already, the exhilaration of non-stop adrenaline, the revolution of strange hotel rooms, of endless takeoffs and landings. The blur of days rushed by like the frames of a filmstrip, perpetual progress of the dreams he harbored in his childhood bedroom.

Except he was still waiting, he realized, for any of them to truly feel like his own.

Zayn blinked, bringing the lights back into sharp resolution. He was struck suddenly with an idea, and extracted his phone from his pocket, composing a hasty text to Amber.

_can u send me my website info again pls thank u xx_

Three minutes later he got the e-mail notification. It was the fifth time in the past year she’d forwarded the message to him. He got up from the stony ledge, climbed back over the railing onto the road, and began the long descent.

*

_update to zackmillermusic.com_  
Sunday 06.15.14 5:37AM  
posted by Zack Miller 

_I’m awake in my house in Hollywood when I should be asleep. When you’re living in your dreams you’re expected to comply with your prescribed reality. We all sleep when we know we should be awake. Sometimes we choose it. Sometimes the dreams seem worth it._

_Because no matter how far we step back, we can’t ever see the movie set. We’re not meant to. But we know it’s there because all anyone ever yells is ACTION._

_How do we quit the scene but not the stage?_

_This is CUT. This is the real reveal. From now on there’s no pretense, no light tricks, no alluding to illusions. There’s no curtain lift. There’s no curtain at all._

_This is an apology to both of us, you and me, for taking this long to tear it all down._

_I am Zayn Malik._

_There are no more edits. You’re really seeing me now, for the first time.  
I hope I see you soon._

*

The first half of the week was non-stop grey and gloomy; thick clouds covered the city and brought a cool, misty rain that made Zayn miss England fiercely and dig his warm scarves out of the back of his closet. His new personal legal team was moving as quickly as possible against the retaliation of his record label, which was doing everything in its power to make Zayn’s life impossible. They cut off his phone, all of his accounts, and froze his social media; his blog post disappeared, but it didn’t matter, screenshots had been circulated everywhere. Some form of his actual name had trended on Twitter for most of Sunday and Monday. On Tuesday he got a certified letter from his manager that served as her resignation; on Wednesday he woke up to an eviction notice.

All of it was highly irritating and massively inconvenient, but Zayn had never felt more self-assured. He refused to make a formal statement or address any of the wild speculation from the media, but he did post four demo tracks to Soundcloud under his real name. In the first twelve hours he had half a million hits.

He let his lawyers worry about his intellectual property, injunctions and lawsuits, his assets and recoupables. All Zayn could think about, when the noise died down, was Liam. Even before his phone stopped working, Liam had made no attempt to contact him, and Zayn was increasingly doubtful that he would ever want to. He sat awake at night on his concrete balcony, lingering under the overhang, slowly smoking cigarettes down to the stubs of their filters, trying in vain to numb the hollow ache in his chest.

On Friday morning it was pouring down rain. Zayn had to meet with his lawyers; there were papers to sign and plans to go over, strategies for impending negotiations. His gate buzzer rang a few minutes before his car was scheduled to arrive and Zayn was still getting dressed. He’d specifically included the gate security code in his reservation, but the car service had been fumbling it all week, given his new personal account. The gate rang again and Zayn muttered in frustration as he hurried shirtless down the stairs to manually hit the ‘open’ button on his security keypad. He didn’t even glance at the video monitor, entirely too preoccupied with rushing back up to his room to finish pairing a shirt and a tie.

He had the shirt on his arms, the tie hanging around his collar, when his doorbell went. He peered out into his bedroom from his walk-in closet, thinking for a moment that he’d mistakenly heard it, the suspicion evaporating when it sounded again, echoing through the house.

Zayn went back downstairs, buttoning the cuffs of his sleeves as he did so, prepared to open the door and ask his driver to kindly wait in the car like he was meant to.

What he found on his doorstep was Liam, absolutely drenched and dripping, arms folded and shoulders hunched. He didn’t even have a jacket on.

Zayn was so stunned, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, that he couldn’t quite manage to form a sentence.

“Could I come in, possibly?” Liam finally said, and Zayn moved aside quickly to let him in.

“Yeah—sorry, come in, yeah, wow,” Zayn said, closing the door again, looking at Liam like he might be an apparition. “Hi.”

“So sorry to turn up like this—I mean, without calling, but,” Liam gestured to himself, frowning. “Also like _this_. I can’t find my brolly. And your voicemail has been full since Wednesday.”

“It’s alright,” Zayn said, still stunned, his thoughts scrambling to put themselves into some sort of order.

“Are you off somewhere?” Liam asked, taking stock of Zayn’s half-buttoned shirt, the undone tie. “I’m sorry, I can go. We can chat some other time.”

“No—” Zayn said, reaching for Liam’s elbow even though Liam had made no move to actually go. “I mean—yeah, I’m supposed to leave for a meeting soon, but—it can wait.”

Zayn kept his hand on Liam’s arm a moment longer, and swayed a little closer before letting go.

“Well,” Liam began, sniffing audibly, then exhaling in a half-sigh. “I don’t know what sort of week you’ve been having, but mine has been kind of terrible.”

Zayn blinked at Liam in confusion; surely he was making some sort of joke that Zayn just didn’t understand. Liam just peered back at him, sincere and a little wistful. His hair was still dripping, down his forehead, and along the side of his neck.

“You know,” Liam said, shrugging. “Not seeing you, or talking to you. It sucked a lot.”

“Sucked a lot for me too, yeah,” Zayn said quietly.

“I’m sorry that I freaked out on you,” Liam said. “I mean,” he paused, sniffling again, rubbing the back of his hand under his nose. “I think it was a little bit understandable, you know, my reaction and everything. But I went to see my mum for a few days, and while I was there, I thought about it a lot. And I tried to think about what I would have done, if it were the other way round somehow. And I’m not sure I came up with anything better, quite frankly.”

“Alright,” Zayn said, still tentative, uncertain of where Liam was going with all of this.

“What I mean to say is, I don’t blame you,” Liam said. “And looking back, you know—” Liam laughed a little, short and quiet. “It all makes so much sense now. I thought—all the vagueness, the wanting to stay in, not going out, never wanting me to take your photo—all that time I thought it was because you were uncomfortable with me.”

“No,” Zayn countered, shaking his head.

“When actually, you were just—you were trying so hard to be comfortable with yourself.”

Zayn nodded a little, once again lacking the ability to put words together.

“I won’t ever tell anyone, I promise,” Liam said, so serenely earnest that Zayn’s throat closed up. “You’ve trusted me with so much, and I’ll even—I don’t know how it works, but. I’ll sign something if that’s what you need. You know, for confidentiality.”

“Liam,” Zayn said, washed over with affection, unable to contain his smile, fighting to keep the corners of his mouth from turning upward. “You really don’t have to do that.”

“Okay, but, I would,” Liam said, meeting Zayn’s gaze. “I don’t care about all that celebrity stuff.”

“I believe you,” Zayn said, shuffling a half step closer. “I do.”

Liam reached for Zayn’s hand, taking it loosely into his own, lacing their fingers together. “Do you need a ride to your meeting?”

Zayn raised an eyebrow, thinking. “Maybe, yeah. But first,” he said, squeezing Liam’s hand a little, tugging him toward the front room. “I think I should probably fill you in on how my week went.”

“Do we have time?” Liam asked.

“Mhm,” Zayn answered, tugging his phone from his pocket, bringing up the number for his car service. “We do now.”

[fin]


End file.
